
Book-_ii4l 



CHRISTIAN HISTORY - 



Three Great Periods 

MODERN PHASES 



JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN 

Late Lecturer on Ecclesiastical History in Harvard University 



Though all the windes of doctrin were let loose to play upon the earth, 
so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licencing and prohibiting to 
misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falshood grapple: who ever knew 
Truth put to the wors, in a free and open encounter? 

Milton, Areopagitica 



' B O'S^'O N 
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 
1901 






Copyright, 188S, 
By Joseph Henry Allen. 






University Press: 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



PKEFACE. 



"l/rODEEN" CHEISTIANITY offers to the histor- 
-^^-'- ical student this unique phenomenon : that it 
is found equally alive and vigorous at both poles 
(so to speak) of the intellectual sphere in which our 
religious life is cast. At one end of the scale it 
shows the most rigid adhesion to authority and 
dogma ; at the other end it expands in the widest 
mental liberty. No subjection of the intellect is 
more complete than that with which Leo the Thir- 
teenth enjoins upon his subjects to abide by the 
Mediaeval system of Aquinas; no philosophic spec- 
ulation is more unrestrained than that associated 
with the Christianity of a Schleiermacher, a Marti- 
neau, or a Colenso. Nay, while it is the nature of 
Science to disown any theological designation, the 
last results of Science and its boldest theories are 
eagerly embraced by many who assert their birth- 
right and their choice in whatever may be implied 
by the Christian name. 



IV PREFACE. 

I am not aware tliat any attempt has yet been 
made, for the religious student, to reconcile these 
opposing aspects in a single view. At all events, 
this — which might well appear the most important 
field iu Christian history — has not ordinarily been 
even surveyed in our courses of theological instruc- 
tion. It would be too much to claim for the follow- 
ing chapters that they aim to supply the want thus 
indicated. They are, however, an essay designed to 
show, in some detail, how that want should be met. 
Of the topics presented, five include the purely 
ecclesiastical or dogmatic phases of the Eeformation 
Period, — that is, from 1500 to 1650; five trace 
the several lines followed since, in the direction of 
free thought and modern scholarship ; while an in- 
termediate chapter describes the bridge connecting 
the earlier and later, across a gulf that might seem 
impassable, — the passage from dogma to pure rea- 
son. This mode of treatment may serve at least 
to hint what should (in my view) be the method 
pursued, to bring the more valuable lessons of our 
history within hail of contemporary thought. 

It would be idle to affect an unaided first-hand 
knowledge of the many names witli which I have 
liad to deal, such as to justify the tone of confidence 
in w^hich I have been obliged to speak of them. As 
to this, I wish to say two things : that I should be 



PREFACE. V 

Sony to belie, by the necessary brevity and free- 
dom of the criticisms expressed, the real veneration 
and homage I feel towards these great names in 
theology, philosophy, and science ; and that — ex- 
cepting some details of the physical sciences — 
whatever judgments are spoken or hinted rest upon 
a degree of direct study or acquaintance sufficient 
to make the judgment in all cases my own, and 
not the echo of another mind. I have (in other 
words), while following the best guides within my 
reach, sought to know these masters of thought from 
their own witness of themselves, and not from hear- 
say of other men. So nmch, I conceive, is due in 
common respect to the great and illuminated minds 
that have won for us, under hard conditions, the 
larger sphere of thought in which we live. 

In general, I have interpolated few opinions of 
my own, except so far as these are necessarily 
implied in speaking of the views of others. But I 
should be ashamed to study such a field as this, 
or to offer anybody else the fruits of study in it, 
if the whole thing were a matter of moral indiffer- 
ence to me. On the contrary, I hold that the les- 
sons of history are eminently lessons of practical 
conviction and duty ; and, moreover, that the motive 
which this implies is the only deliverance of the 
soul from the dilettanteism, the scepticism, and 



VI PKEFACE. 

finally the pessimistic fatalism, which are the beset- 
ting peril of studies followed in a spirit merely 
scientific, or merely critical. I have accordingly 
given at the end, briefly and with such emphasis 
as I can command, what seem to me the true les- 
sons of our subject, most in accordance with the 
religious conditions and demands of the present 
day, — the general result, to which so many par- 
ticular inferences appear to lead. With this hint 
I here take leave of my task. 

J. H. A. 

Cambridge, August 21, 1883. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. The Protestant Refoemation ......'. 1 

II. The Catholic Reaction 26 

III. Calvinism 48 

IV. The Puritan Commonwealth 74 

V. Port Royal 100 

VI. Passage erom Dogma to Pure Reason .... 126 

YII. English Rationalism 155 

VIII. Infidelity in France 185 

IX. The German Critics 214 

X. Speculative Theology 242 

XI. The Reign of Law 272 



Chronological Outline 311 

Eminent jSTames 314 

Index 315 



MODERN PHASES OF FAITH. 



THE PEOTESTANT EEFOEMATIOK 

ACUESOEY view of the event we call the Eefor- 
mation, with the Eeligious Wars that followed 
close upon it, shows us at first sight one of the great, 
unaccountable, awful calamities of human history, — 
an era of anger and hatred, of wreck and change. 
It came not to bring peace, but a sword. So far from 
gladness and triumph, it would seem that we could 
think of it only with horror and lamentation. 

And none the less, because it was an unavoidable 
calamity. We cannot explain to ourselves why a 
single incompleted step in spiritual progress must be 
taken at so frightful a cost of human suffering and 
guilt. We are apt to think of it simply as an his- 
torical event : of its incidents, as scenes in a drama ; 
of its results, only as they have affected us, — in the 
main so largely for our benefit ; of its principles, as 
we applaud or sympathize with the leading actors in 
it, on one side or the other. But we look at it again, 
or from another point of view, and it is all alive with 
passion and with pain. " If I had known what was 
1 



2 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION. 

before me," said Luther, " teu horses would not have 
drawn me to it ! " 

The deepest tragedy of the thing was, that, as in 
all great conflicts of history, there was equal sincerity 
and equal passion on both sides. It was the sincere 
devotion of both parties that made the conflict obsti- 
nate and bitter. If we ask why it must be so, per- 
haps our only answer is, that it always is so,, — in 
Puritan England, as in America twenty years ago, 
and in aU. Europe then. It is part of the universal 
struggle for existence, in which the fittest survive 
only in virtue of the courage, cunning, and strength 
by which they prove their fitness. 

It is not easy to see at this distance why the ascetic 
fervor of Savonarola ; the intellectual honesty of the 
early German scholars ; the group of earnest and cul- 
tivated reformers at Oxford ; the keen satire and 
common-sense ethics of Erasmus ; the rude wit of 
Hutten ; the humble, patient, faithful piety of at any 
rate a very large part of the Catholic priests and peo- 
ple, along with the anxious efforts of all the better 
class of ecclesiastics in every age, — why all these 
should have failed to bring about reform within the 
Church ; why what we call " The Reformation " had 
to come about through a century of bloodshed and 
horror. The wisest men of that day did not see the 
need. Erasmus and Sir Thomas More (perhaps the 
two wisest men of their time) alike deplored the 
struggle as a mere calamity. Most likely we should 
have deplored it too. But it was as in the Apostles' 
time ; and none were more ready than Luther to be 
amazed, with Paul, that "God had chosen the foolish 



AN IllREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT.^ 3 

things of the world to confound the wise, and weak 
things to confound the mighty." 

All the great revolutions of history seem to show 
that certain necessary changes which the wise and 
good have looked forward to longingly and helplessly, 
and tried ineffectually to bring about, have come at 
length in some flame or tornado of popular passion ; 
have become the watchword of fanaticism ; have been 
carried forward to victory under the banner of hosts 
who were very much in earnest, but mostly neither 
very wise nor very good. It was so with the French 
Eevolution, and with our Civil War. And so it was 
with the Eeformation. All that was really good in it 
had been longed for, demanded, attempted, a hundred 
times, in a hundred ways ; but it had to wait for a 
crisis and a storm, which swept away, along with the 
evil that had grown intolerable, the peace, prosperity, 
and joy which seem in our ordinary mood the things 
best worth having in this human life. 

Twa things made that storm inevitable. 

The first was the determination of the Catholic 
Church, at every cost, not to let go anything of its 
pretensions, its power, or its sources of wealth. It 
had come, frankly, from being a purely spiritual 
force, an organizer and guide of the higher civiliza- 
tion, to include everything that we mean under the 
name of secular government. Its head was Sovereign 
as well as Pontiff. Like Alexander Borgia, he might 
spend his revenues to build up the fortunes of a 
family infamous for the variety and atrocity of its 
crimes. Like Julius II., he might stake all his de- 
sires and ambitions on military conquest and the 



4 THE PROTESTANT KEFOKxMATlON. 

splendors of a princely capital. Like Leo X., he 
might notoriously disclaim all pretensions of Chris- 
tian faith, and be known at best as a patron of so- 
called religious art, at worst as a patron of the secret 
vices of a papal court.* 

All this was publicly known, to the grief, scandal, 
and shame, we cannot doubt, of multitudes who, like 
Erasmus, lacked the courage, or like Savonarola the 
power, to stay the tide that must seem irresistible. 
For the Church was implicated, in a thousand ways, 
with the political system of Europe. The nature of 
its authority made every sovereign, in some sense, a 
retainer, an ally, or else an open enemy ; and its will 
was as merciless as its hand was strong. In the 
premature war of revolt that broke out in Bohemia, 
after the Church had sealed its act of unity by the 
martyr death of Huss, forty thousand were slain in 
battle ; and a resolute, hardy population were com- 
pletely crushed. Europe might well wait a century 
after that, before the bloody experiment could be 
dared again ; and — with all the trained skill of an 
ecclesiastical police that took in the birth-festival, the 
marriage-sacrament, the death-bed scene, the states- 

* "An elegant lieathen Pope, who carried on Tusculan disputa- 
tions ; Cardinals, who adorned their walls with scenes from Ovid's 
Metamorphoses, and devoted themselves to Ciceronian Latin ; and 
a whole scene of luxurious intellectuality in Rome, contrasted bit- 
terly with the palpable superstitions and abuses of the out-of-doors 
world ; and the centre of Christendom, putting itself quietly and 
unconcernedly ab extra to a whole system for wliicli it was responsi- 
ble, while it taught men to despise that system, provoked at the 
same time disgust and rebellion against its own hypocrisy." — 
MozLEY, Essays, etc., vol. i. p. 355. 



PEACE OF THE CHURCH. 

man's cabinet, the council of war, and the daily espial 
of the confessional for part of its field — we may be 
sure that the Church would watch and guard very 
warily, would strike secretly, swiftly, and sharply, 
against any symptom of a thought more free and a 
conscience more bold than seemed consistent with 
its peace. 

In the second place, that peace of the Church, as 
we ought not to forget, was very dear to great multi- 
tudes of its disciples and subjects. Whatever the 
Eoman Church has lacked in its instructions, it has 
never lacked the piety of sentiment, the devotion, the 
adoration, the fanatical and abject loyalty, at need, of 
the vast majority of its adherents. Its iniquities and 
oppressions were to most men a far-away and uncer- 
tain rumor ; its comforting words, its chanted prayers, 
its sacred processions, the magic of its solemn bells, 
the myriad links by which it fastened itself to every- 
thing that was holy, sweet, and dear in the daily 
life of millions, — all these were very near. By a 
thousand years of sleepless, incessant activity, it had 
woven a spell about the very conscience and thought 
of men ; while in its invisible presence it haunted 
every step of their common walk. It had possessed 
their minds with its own scheme of creation and re- 
demption, of heaven and hell. 

In a community like ours, of twenty sects equal be- 
fore the law, of popular science, and intellectual lib- 
erty, think how timidly, even here, a serious-minded 
man or a pious woman listens to a word which 
seems to invade the secret charm that resides in 
church authority, — thin ghost that it is of what was 



6 THE PKOTESTANT llEFOKMATIOX. 

once overshadowing and irresistible ; and the wonder 
will then be, not that the Church bore the attack with 
so little loss of power, but that the attack was dared 
at all. The very logic, philosophy, and morals by 
which the attack had to be made were the creation, 
invention, instruction, of schools founded by the 
Church and consecrated to its defence. That par- 
ticular spell was broken, in part, by the new Greek 
and Eoman learning. But in the realm of religion 
proper the Church still held its own, almost undis- 
puted ; and, for authority, " the least papist," said 
Luther, " is more capable of government than ten of 
our court nobles." 

Even the most daring of the Reformers did hardly 
more than to draw a doctrine slightly different from 
the same Scripture, and to deny the Church's claim 
to be its only interpreter. Their intellectual limita- 
tion shows us more clearly than almost anything else 
can do the degree to which that Church had prepos- 
sessed men's minds. The sort of spiritual authority 
they affected, which is held by their successors in Pro- 
testant countries even to this day, proves how natural 
such authority seemed then, and at what a disadvan- 
tage any must stand who tried to break it down where 
its prestige was so incomparably strong. 

And if we think how helpless we should be, even 
at this day, against such spiritual dominion as still. 
exists, without the help of the steadily increasing 
light that streams from modern science, it can be no 
wonder to us, the power of superstition then. For 
the astronomical spaces of our sky, they had the trim 
fields or palace-splendors of Paradise ; for the geo- 



STKENGTH OF THE CHURCH. 7 

logical depths of our earth, the dreadful and intensely 
real gulfs of hell, whose fires roared in the under- 
ground thunder and blazed in the flaming eruption 
of Vesuvius or ^tna. And so with everything. 
There is a whole chapter, for example, of ghastly 
terror in the sorcery and witchcraft of the Middle 
Age, — relics, perhaps, of old Paganism lingering 
among the people, which the Church had vainly 
put forth all her merciless power to suppress. 

Nothing illustrates more vividly the great horror 
with which she had the skill to possess men's imagi- 
nation than this. The Church had built up, about 
them and within them, a spiritual structure, which 
they clung to with passionate love and reverence, or 
else feared to question with a fear as passionate and 
intense, — where the very thought of doubt was a 
crime, to be burned out by the fires of the stake, or 
purged away by the flames of purgatory. 

It is not likely that at any time in its history the 
Eoman Church felt surer of its strength than the 
moment before the blow was struck. Its capital was 
never so splendid, its treasury never so rich, its' 
priesthood never more numerous, well-trained, and 
confident. The very blunder by which it invited 
the most formidable attack was the blunder of abso- 
lute self-confidence, at the point where it was in 
closest contact with irreverent and hostile feeling, 
most exposed whether to bitter satire or to gravQ 
rebuke, most weak in making its appeal to the worse 
rather than the better side in human nature. In fact, 
its vulnerable point was in its absolute, stupid dis- 
belief that there was such a better side in human 



8 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION. 

nature ; its assumption that it could trade openly in 
vice, and sell indulgences to sin, — in short, that 
every man was bad enough to wish to do all the evil 
he could at the cheapest rate, if he could only be 
satisfied that the license he bought would hold good 
in the other world. 

Of course, it is not the Catholic theory of Indul- 
gences that men can be ransomed by money from the 
pains of hell : that is, no Catholic in his senses would 
ever admit that it is so. The real theory of Indul- 
gences is simply the remission of ecclesiastical pen- 
alties, the counterpart and the relief of penance. 
Besides this, not directly, but by intercession of pur- 
chased prayers, the Church may promise relief from 
the pains of purgatory. But, by its own claims, it 
holds the keys of heaven and hell. It is not likely 
that the ignorant laity would draw any fine distinc- 
tions, any more than that a rude, unscrupulous monk 
like Tetzel would hesitate at any assurance to drive 
a trade. This he did " at a horrible rate," says Luther. 
St. Peter's Church was to be built and glorified in 
Eome ; and at all risks gold must be had from Ger- 
many. The salesman was blatant and impudent. 
Commit what sin you will, said he, were it the vio- 
lation of the Holy Virgin herself, "as soon as the 
gold chinks in the Pope's coffer, it is all wiped out." 
Luther, then " a young doctor, fresh from the forge, 
glowing and cheerful in the Holy Ghost " (as he de- 
scribes himself), was amazed with horror. He de- 
manded that Tetzel should be silenced ; tried vainly 
to force on the ecclesiastics of the day the distinc- 
tion between outward penance and inward penitence; 



INDULGENCES. 9 

and then, to the confusion of the prelates, made a pub- 
lic debate of what they would hush up as a private 
scandal. 

Years before, while toiling painfully, as a pilgrim, 
on his knees up the sacred stairway in Eome, the 
words had flashed upon his mind like a revelation, 
"The just shall live by faith." What was all this 
toilsome penance worth in the eye of God ? " That 
journey to Eome," he used to say afterwards, " I would 
not have missed for a hundred thousand florins." It 
had revealed to him the depth of the mystery of 
Pagan iniquity in the Christian capital. He had 
gone there a pious enthusiast, saying in his heart, 
as he entered the gate, " Hail, holy Eome ! holy by 
the memory of martyrs, and by the sacred blood here 
spilt ! " He had left it, burdened with a weight upon 
his conscience, and perplexed by a problem he could 
not solve. If we can see that problem as he saw it, ^ 
we have a key to the heart of the Eeformation. 

It may be put in some such way as this.* N"o man 
can satisfy divine justice, or be reconciled to God, by 
any merit of his own ; for as his conscience grows 
more clear, he sees more plainly the gulf between 
himself and the Infinite. Theologically speaking, 
that gulf can be bridged only by imputation of the 
merits of Christ. So far, Anselm's view. But how 
shaU he appropriate those merits ? By formalities 
of ritual, fast, and penance ? Eome has shown him, 
behind the veil, what that means. The Church, then, 
cannot solve the problem for him. He cannot solve 

* This point is admirably developed in Canon Mozley's "Essays 
Historical and Theological," voL i. pp. 326-339. 



10 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION. 

it for himself. He cuts it, frankly and audaciously, 
by au act of faith. Believe that you are a child of 
God ; and in that act you are his child. 

I cannot go into the psychology of this solution, 
but must hasten to the result. At Wittenberg, on 
the 31st of October, 1517, Luther nailed up against the 
church door his ninety-five " theses," or queries, on the 
theory of Indulgences. He professed to be astonished 
at the noise they made. He had given no opinion of 
his own : he" had only proposed, in the usual way, a 
few questions of abstract theology. What was all the 
ado about ? So, with a crafty show of innocence and 
submission, he evaded and disguised the controversy 
for some three years : thorniug the papal emissaries 
in debate ; steadily appealing to the Pope ; steadily 
declining to go to Eome in person, whither he was 
blandly invited, and where there were sure remedies 
for such complaints as his, — till he forced a position 
that made him known and powerful everywhere as 
spokesman of the German people. In this crisis he 
is two men at once : to-day, absolute deference and 
submission; within a week, doubting in his private 
letters if the Pope be not Antichrist. His doctrine 
is condemned by Leo X., and his books are ordered 
to be burned. Six months later, in December, 1520, 
he answers by publicly burning the papal bull, and 
with it the entire code of Decretalism ; and the event 
we call the Eeformation has entered upon the field 
of history. 

At Worms next year, at the Imperial Diet (April 
17 and 18, 1521), Luther gives his immortal answer 
to the demand that he shall retract : " Since you seek 



LUTHER AT WORMS. 11 

a plain answer, I will give it without horns or teeth. 
Except I am convinced by holy Scripture, or other 
evident proof, — for I trust neither Pope nor Council : 
I am bound by the Scripture by me cited, — I cannot 
retract, and I will not, anything ; for against con- 
science it is neither safe nor sound to act." And 
here he breaks from the formal Latin of his defence 
into his sturdy Saxon mother-tongue, intelligible and 
plain enough, I think, for our ears to understand : 
" Hie sfehe ich : Ich kan nicht anders : Gott helff 
tnir : Amen ! " * 

It would not be possible here to trace, in the brief- 
est outline, the story of events that followed ; or even 
— which is much more tempting — quote the anec- 
dotes and phrases that point out to us, with a curious 
vividness, the character of this great popular leader. 
A single thing is enough. The power, the terror, the 
prestige, the fascination, the grandeur and splendor 
of the Church, all are weighed against the solitary 
conviction of one man, himself a sworn servant of 
the Church, and penetrated to the soul by awe of her 
authority. In these scales that one man's conscience 
overweighs. In all history, I am not sure that there 
is another example quite so clear, that "One, with 
God, is a majority." Equal courage and sincerity, 
it may be, had been shown by Wiclif, by Huss, by 
Savonarola ; but now the hour has come, as well as 
the man. Even when the little company met in the 
upper chamber at Jerusalem, — at any rate, there 
were a hundred and twenty ; and they did not, by 
any means, stand so openly against everything august 

* Works, Ed. of 1562, vol. ii. p. 165 h. I copy the old spelling. 



12 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION. 

and formidable in the world. They could have had 
no such awe oig^ba E-oman Empire as he must have 
had of the Eoman Church, and no such conviction 
that they were committed to its overthrow. Luther 
is the one great figure :Which represents just that thing 
on the stage of history';' and, in ever so slight view 
of the circumstances, it isi^apossible not to pause an 
instant to point out that moment, that example, of 
the very highest moral courage. Luther is in no 
sense, in our view, a great intellectual leader. The 
forms of thought he clung to the world is letting 
slip without a pang. In his career it is often doubt- 
ful whether piety or policy, whether craft or passion, 
whether reason or prejudice, were stronger in him. 
It may be doubted whether he had the pure physical 
courage of several other leaders of the Eeformation, — 
Zwingli or Latimer, for example. But this great act 
of his life put him worthily, as Captain, at the head 
of the great army which just then was setting out to 
march under the banner of Light. 

If we speak thus of the courage of the Leader, what 
shall we say, on the other hand, of those who were 
only followers — obscure, inconspicuous, unknown ? 
For this great revolution has its humbler, tenderer 
side. The new faith ,finds its warmest disciples 
among the numerous population of the industrious 
poor, in lower Germany and along the lower Ehine. 
Among the heresies of the later Middle Age, none 
had been more dreaded than the mystic and senti- 
mental piety — Beghard or Lollard — that was forever 
emancipating itself from ritual and dogma, seeking 
only the inward assurance of Divine love. This was 



EEFOEM AMONG THE LOWLY. 13 

the spirit in which the Eeformation found now its 
natural ally, — a spirit which the Church must exter- 
minate at all cost. And so we read of mothers who 
were burned alive for teaching their child the Lord's 
Prayer in its mother-tongue ; of children compelled 
with their own hand to light the fagot of their fathers' 
martyrdom ; of women, who did not cease to sing their 
hymn of sweet and patient trust as they lay in the pit 
where they were just going to be buried up alive. 

It is in ^^ymns that rise amid the hum of daily 
toil, that keep tffi^. to the darting of the shuttle and 
the pulses of the ibo^, that cheer the lace- weaver's 
busy task, that swell from thejbroad plain where con- 
gregations gather in the open ai^h^lp. their out-door 
Sunday worship (men, women, and a^i^ren, forty 
thousand sometimes at once), or that float in the 
manly tones of the wayfaring laborer, as he goes from 
city to city, perhaps at hazard of his life, bearing with 
him those precious versions of the Psalms set to music, 
which the press at Geneva is scattering through all 
Christendom, — it is in these pious hymns and sacred 
melodies that the living religion of the time becomes 
blended with all affections and tasks of home, and 
sanctifies the daily life of thousands. This is the 
soil, often drenched with blood, in which our modern 
liberties have their root. Through this channel of 
humble toil, and pain, and tears, the forms of modern 
piety are taking shape, and the tone is given to the 
tenderest, purest, deepest faith of the modern world. 

A better name could not have been taken to de- 
scribe the principle on which Luther now, deliberately 
and consciously, staked his very salvation, than the!' 



14 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION. 

plirase which he borrowed from Paul, " Justification 
by Faith." The facts of religious history teach us 
very little, unless they teach us that a time of spirit- 
ual crisis has always to be met in just that way. 
The strong conviction of one man must be brought 
face to face with whatever we can understand by the 
phrase "powers of the world," — whether prejudice 
of education, government authority, temptation of 
indolence, sympathy, friendship, interest, personal 
peace and quiet, — and must be strong enough to 
overcome. 

It must be the conviction of one man standing 
alone. A thousand more may do as he does, but each 
man's act must be his own. The encouragement of 
example, the sympathy of friends, the thousand whole- 
^ '^S|A some influences that surround one, and keep his heart 
^^'yi whole, — these are for ordinary men and ordinary 
^^>^ times. The moment of crisis, whether in a conspicu- 
^^W ous epoch of history, or in one man's lonely struggle 
in the dark, demands a faith that absolutely dispenses 
with them all. A ship is good to sail in ; a raft, plank, 
or float may keep you, at need, from drowning ; but 
you never learn to swim till the moment you trust 
yourself absolutely to the buoyancy of the water: 
then it is no matter to you how deep it is. It is 
only by such a faith as this that, in the true religious 
sense, any man living can be justified. It must be, 
in other words, that fact in the soul which Paul 
means, when he says one must have his salvation 
by the direct grace of God. It is his own solitary 
relation, and not another man's, to that ultimate 
spiritual or moral truth. 



\ 



JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH. 15 

The phrase in which Luther stated this great fact 
of personal experience — faith in the Scriptures, faith 
in Christ — was full of meaning and power ; because 
it took at once the place of the form, the symbol, the 
technicality, with which the Church had covered it, 
in the multiplicity of her symbols, in the tradition 
heaped on tradition of her interpretation, in the mi- 
nute, incessant exactions of her discipline. So that 
the phrase "faith in the Scriptures," "faith in Christ," 
expressed the pure freedom of the religious life. But 
as soon as that phrase in turn is overlaid with form 
and technicality, — as soon as it prevents us from 
seeing, instead of helping us to see, that there is 
literally nothing between the conscience of such a . 
man and the Infinite itself, with wdiatever he can "" 
conceive or know of the sense of moral obligation, — ■ 
then it becomes a falsehood and not a truth. When 
Garrison stood out against the church-powers of his 
day on what to him was an absolute moral jpnviction, 
it was he, not they, that kept all wL^ av^s worth 
keeping in the phrase " Salvation, JjjK^rist," — un- 
derstanding by "Christ" the higliesf^^bol we know 
of a ransomed nature. When John Stuart. Mill said, 
"I will call no being good, who is not what^Lniean 
when I apply that epithet to my fellOw-creatitfes ; 
and if such a being can sentence me to hell fdf'no^^,^ 
so calling him, to hell I will go," —it was he that"-^_v 
was justified by faith, not the theologians who drove .,• #. 
him to use that phrase. In seeking to understand "^-^ 
the great phases of human history, let us endeavor, 
once for all, to deal not with names but with things. 

It is not, then, the symbol of theology, but the fact 



16 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION. 

of life that we try to understand in Luther's sublime 
doctrine of Justification by Faith. What it meant at 
that time we must endeavor to see not by the detail 
of study and interpretation so much as by the exer- 
cise of historical sympathy, — by comprehending, if 
we can, the feeling of fearful joy, of trembling hope, of 
grateful freedom, of increasing courage and strength, 
in the minds of those who responded to Luther's 
appeal, and who struck like strong swimmers, or else 
were borne as trusting voyagers, into that deep stream 
of a new mental life. 

Helps to such imaginative sympathy we have in 
lives of the Reformers ; in hymns, correspondence, 
and other pious writings of the time ; in tender tales, 
half-fictitious, which show how the new influence 
radiated first in those quiet home-circles grouped 
nearest about the centre from which it issued. But 
my present aim is only to point out this one thing in 
the same line of thought that we have been following : 
how the declaration of Luther suddenly made men 
aware of a new relation in which they stood, person- 
ally, to God himself and all divine realities. That 
word carried them right back to the Bible itself, es- 
pecially to the Psalms and Epistles, in which they 
found the very fountain-head of religious truth. All 
the enormous mass of tradition, ceremony, penance, 
that had intervened, was suddenly swept away, as a 
mist by a gust of wind ; and there was open to them, 
very literally, a new sky and a new earth, quite hidden 
from them till then. They, too, were face to face witli 
the Infinite. In the joy and strength of that tliought, 
they were emancipated from the yoke of fear. 



FIDELITY OF THE PROTESTANTS. 17 

What astonishes me most in it all is, that these 
men and women, — humble, devout souls, that by 
nature and training must have been among the most 
devoted of the children of the Church, — that they, 
when once this liberating word has been spoken, 
seem never to have felt a single doubt. All their 
lives they had been told that to distrust the slightest 
word of the Church was heresy, deserving infinite 
wrath and torment, more heinous than any other sin. 
Yet at a word that great dread passes utterly away ; 
and in the deadly warfare of a hundred years against 
ecclesiastical power, hedged as it was with so much 
of ancient reverence, and having on its side the ap- 
palling yet cowardly alternative, " If you are right, 
we at least are safe; but if we are right, then you 
are lost forever," — in all that long and bitter war, 
the faith of the Protestants in their own cause never 
once wavered. Individuals fell away, but the heart 
of Protestantism was never vexed by the shadow of 
any doubt. 

This, I say, is the great fact that amazes me. And 
yet the creed of Protestants themselves was vacilla- 
ting and inconsistent on that very point of liberty 
of conscience. Calvin burned Servetus, believing his 
heresy to be damnable. "I killed Miinzer/' said 
Luther, "and his death is a load round my neck; 
but I killed him because he sought to kill my Christ." 
Yet, with all these differences, with the numberless 
"variations" which Bossuet charged against them, 
orthodox and heterodox alike, Protestants never wa- 
vered in their faith, that the way they had found was 
the right and the safe way. That way certainly was 



18 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION. 

not the way of accurate opinion ; it was, so far as it 
was a true way, the way of free conscience. And 
their justification, too, before the great tribunal of 
history, is what Luther's had been at the bar of God, 

— the "Justification of Faith." 

The Keformation-period may be reckoned, very 
broadly, as covering about a hundred and fifty years, 

— that is, from early in the sixteenth to the middle 
of the seventeenth century. This term, again, may 
be pretty accurately divided into three periods of not 
very unequal length, — that of theological controversy, 
of religious wars, and of civil or diplomatic struggles 
culminating in the Thirty Years' War. The close of 
these periods is marked respectively by the treaty of 
Cateau-Cambresis, in which France and Spain were 
mutually pledged to the armed extermination of 
heresy (1559), shortly following the religious peace 
of Augsburg (1555), and when the Council of Trent 
was just approaching its end ; the Truce with Spain 
(1609), in which the Dutch Eepublic secured its 
virtual independence ; and the Treaty of Westphalia 
(1648), which makes the point of departure for the 
diplomatic history of modern Europe. This last date 
also corresponds with the captivity of Charles I., and 
the establishment of the Puritan Commonwealth in 
England. 

The first thing that strikes us in this rapid review 
is, that it is a period not of construction but of trans- 
ition. The work it had in hand, it necessarily left 
incomplete. It launched the political and social fabric 
of Europe upon a course of revolution and reconstruc- 
tion, of which it is far too soon, even now, to predict 



THE REFORMATION PERIOD. 19 

the end. Its protest in tlie name of Free Conscience 
was only a far-away anticipation of our era of Free 
Thought. The political arrangements that resulted 
from it were only earlier steps in that era of revolu- 
tion which is upon us now. Its chaotic struggles for 
better social justice were only the harbinger of that 
broad popular movement, which has come to one 
crisis already in America, and to another in France, 
and which is only beginning, at this late day, to find 
its interpretation in what we have learned to call 
Social Science. 

Thus the event we call The Eeformation is not so 
simple in theory as the inauguration of Protestant 
theology. It is the transition from the imperial- 
ecclesiastical system, of the Middle Age to the free 
thought, democratic policies, and social levellings of 
the modern world. The ashes of its theological war- 
fare are still hot ; the fires of its revolutionary prin- 
ciples still burn. The last French Empire went down 
in 1870, in an attempt to recover something of that 
old dominion ; and the lost cause of the temporal 
power of the Pope is held by some good Catholics 
to be no unlikely occasion of another religious war 
in our own day. 

There is, however, a certain dramatic unity and 
completeness in the period just defined, which is not 
at all apparent since. For then there was a definite 
issue, clearly understood by all the contending par- 
ties, — the victory or defeat of the Mediaeval sys- 
tem, in Church and State, which was the real object 
of attack. So that, during this period, we may say 
that not only all thinking men, but all governments. 



20 THE PROTESTANT EEFORMATION. 

states, and towns, all bodies of armed men, almost 
we might add all trades, all professions, and every 
man, were forced to take sides for or against the 
Pope. Such tides of revolutionary thought and pas- 
sion work out very widely on institutions and events ; 
and we may compare the track they cleave in the 
field of history to a glacier's path through the valley, 
which we trace by the boulders and drift it piles 
along its edge. Its present action is purely destruc- 
tive. Only its later effect is seen in the deeper soil 
and the increased fertility. 

The events of the Reformation-period belong to 
the field of general history, and it would be impos- 
sible to give ever so brief an outline of them here. 
Some of them will meet us from time to time, in the 
view we shall have to take of a few conspicuous 
objects in that wide field. For the present, we have 
only to look at a few consequences of the working 
out of the Protestant idea. 

And here we are struck, first of all, by seeing how 
quickly Protest runs out to Individualism. The wide 
flood beats, we say, like waves upon a sea-wall, until 
it is ruined and undermined. But each wave beats 
at its particular stone. There are as many protests 
as there are types of mind and conscience. Each has 
its own point to carry ; each is independent of all 
the rest. At first Luther stands alone. Wlien he is 
no longer alone, but head of a great host, he finds the 
errors of his fellows as dangerous as those of the com- 
mon enemy. At INIarburg he turns his back when 
Zwingli, a bolder and a clearer-headed man than he, 
offers his right hand in token of fraternity. Carlstadt 



LIBERTY AND UNION. 21 

and Calvin have a will as well as he, and respect his 
decision no more than he the Pope's. The logic of 
all this is soon seen. As the first Eefornier stood 
alone, confronting the world of Catholic Christendom, 
and meeting the Pope's excommunication by an ex- 
communication of his own, so Protestantism itself 
comes down fast to the condition of strife among 
numberless jealous individualisms, with as many sects 
as there are men to make them or names to call them 
by, till many a church is literally cut down to the 
gospel minimum of two or three. 

But, again, if it were only to make its own exist- 
ence possible, Protestantism must find some check to 
this dispersion. There must be some common ground 
of attack and defence. The interior history of Pro- 
testantism is by no means so simple a thing as a 
history of opinions branching out more and more 
widely asunder, tapering from dogmatism towards 
scepticism at one pole and sentimental mysticism 
at the other. On the contrary, it is the history of 
a conflict between two opposing tendencies. Over 
against the demand of liberty is set the need of 
union. The process is not random and chaotic, as it 
looks at first, but is eminently dramatic. The fatal 
division of Lutheran and Reformed in Germany is 
quelled in the terror of tlie Thirty Years' "War. T^ie 
quarrelsome sectaries in Puritan England are sharply 
disciplined under the military rule of Cromwell. But 
without such outside pressure, the dispersion is as 
sure as that of steam in the open air. The weakness 
of Protestantism is from the same source as its 
strength, — that elasticity, which means the mutual 
repulsion of its particles. 



22 THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION. 

Naturally, the Protestant forces attempt in self- 
defence to rally under some one standard of authority. 
And at first the problem seems an easy one. From 
the Church in its corruption fall back upon the Church 
in its simplicity. From Councils and Priests appeal 
to inspired Prophets and Apostles. For the false 
Vicar of God take the infallible Word of God. 
"The Bible, the Bible only, is the religion of Pro- 
testants ! " But quickly it appears that the Bible 
may be read in almost as many ways as there are 
minds to read it. If Luther and Calvin differ as to 
some of its plainest words, what must be the effect 
of offering to millions the whole array of history, 
prophecy, proverb, appeal, and fervid inward experi- 
ence, that go to make up that book ? Some formula 
of belief — something more than the simple watcli- 
word Justification by Faith — might seem a clear 
necessity of the position. At first a Confession, then 
a Creed. And, the Creed once defined and taken for 
authority, soon follows the whole long story of big- 
otry, exclusion, religious hate, sectarian jealousy and 
feud ; till many frankly choose the yoke of Eome again 
before this mockery of freedom, and many more aban- 
don all hope of fellowshij) or strength or meaning in 
religion itself. To such melancholy straits the human 
mind must pass in the evolution of a great idea ! 

Again, the weakness of Protestantism is seen in its 
narrowing of the field and meaning of Religion as a 
power in the world. It was the glory of the great 
Catholic structure of the Middle Age, that — with all 
its evil ambition and its crimes against humanity — 
it did meet |he problem of political and social life in 



4 



THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY. 23 

a broad way, so far as it could be comprehended at 
that day, and with inflexible courage tried to solve it. 
It did this in a Name before which all differences of 
social level absolutely disappeared. Emperor or king, 
peasant or serf, priest or noble, it knew men only as 
equal subjects of its spiritual empire. It declared 
the state of slavery impossible for a Christian, and 
did in fact practically abolish slavery in Europe by 
embracing all ranks and conditions within its fold. 
It established the Truce of God, setting a bound to 
the rage of private wars, and winning society slowly 
towards a reign of peace. It created charities on a 
scale with which the world had till then known 
nothing to compare. In an age of strife, ravage, 
destitution, and disease, far worse than what we suf- 
fer now, it grappled as it could with that hopeless 
question of Pauperism : on false principles, indeed 
— by adoptiiig and consecrating Mendicancy ; but 
perhaps no other way was possible then. At least, 
it was better than brutal and pitiless neglect, — the 
old Pagan way. It assumed the charge of educating 
every child, — not in the way we think right, but at 
least so far as was needful to make him a subject of 
its empire and an heir of its hope ; and so, of meeting 
hand-to-hand the vice, ignorance, and savagery of the 
lowest order in the State. In the Catholic system 
once, as in Papal countries still, every man, however 
guilty or wretched, is in theory at least to be met 
by the formal offices of the Church for instruction, 
for comfort, for rescue from sin, at least for absolu- 
tion at his death-hour. This splendid i^eal it has 
always professed, of what Keligion has ta do for so- 
ciety as well as for every man. \£ 

'4 



24 THE PROTESTANT IlEFORJIATION. 

As against this, not only we have to be reminded 
that in all Protestant countries more than half the 
population, numerically, stand in no acknowledged 
religious connection at all with their fellow-men, and 
are only approached, at hazard as it were and uncer- 
tainly, by the voluntary efforts of a few, moved indi- 
vidually by the power of the gospel and by love for 
souls. That, perhaps, is the inevitable consequence 
of respecting as we do the private conscience. But 
we see, too, that Protestantism does not understand 
the energies it has evoked. It fears them, shrinks 
from them, makes terms with them, does not so much 
as attempt to educate and control them. Liberty of 
opinion it has sought vainly, by every expedient, to 
pacify, overawe, and hush. The portentous birth of 
Democracy, which sprang up at its side, it began to 
fear and hate, as soon as that outran the cautious 
limits the Pteformers had proposed. When the Nobles 
scorned Luther's counsels of mercy, and the Peasants 
rejected his words of peace, he — a man of the people 
if any man ever was — was sharp and implacable to 
side with authority against rebellion. "A pious Chris- 
tian," he said, " should die a hundred deaths, rather 
than give way a hair's-breadth to the Peasants' de- 
mands ! " In America we have seen in our own day 
the encroachments of a despotism as sordid and mer- 
ciless as any in Naples or Vienna, erected on the 
basest of all possible foundations, property in man, 
— a despotism which under forms of popular govern- 
ment insulted every instinct of liberty, and under 
forms of law violated every principle of justice, — • 
yet how slightly held in check by the Protestant 



OUTWORKING OF PROTESTANTISxM. 25 

Church, spite of its birth-right of freedom ! how 
largely helped by the alliance of a degenerate Eo- 
man Church, with its instinct of servility ! 

The ecclesiastical life of Protestantism is thus 
weak and narrow. Its strength and its glory have 
been in another field. The history of Protestant na- 
tions is the history, with scarce any exception, of the 
enterprise, discovery, arts, science, invention, learning, 
and philanthropy most characteristic of modern times. 
Set aside the one great enterprise of the Jesuit mis- 
sions, — whose best strength was spent two hundred 
years ago, — it would be hard to show one great 
movement of the last three centuries, of permanent 
and marked success, affecting deeply the welfare of 
mankind at large, dating from the Eoman Church or 
from any people within its communion, to set off 
against the great political reforms of England, the 
colonizing of free States in America and Australia, 
tlie thought and skill given to popular education, the 
revolution in commerce wrought by steam, the con- 
quest of nature inaugurated by modern science. 

All these are not, of course, to be credited to Pro- 
testantism consciously working out as such. They 
are not its product as an organized spiritual force. 
Far from it. But they are trophies of the emanci- 
pated energy, the wider intelligence, the individual 
force of conviction, the moral courage, which it was 
the mission of Protestantism to set free as an agency 
in the world's affairs. And widely as the spell of 
Eome has remained unbroken, so widel}'' this energy 
has continued latent, inert, impossible. 



II- 

THE CATHOLIC EEACTIOK 

THEEE is some truth, no doubt, in the saying 
that what Eome has lost of temporal dominion, 
in consequence of the great Protestant schism, she 
has gained, or widened, as a purely spiritual power, 
in the region of conscience, emotion, and doctrinal 
belief. The two dogmas added to the Catholic creed 
in these last few years — the Immaculate Conception 
(1854) and Papal Infallibility (1870) — are cited by 
fervent Romanists as a proof of this. And it is very 
likely true that Rome never had a more absolute hold 
upon the devotion of a larger multitude of subjects 
than to-day, or anything like so large. If it is so, it 
is one result of the remarkable reaction in the six- 
teenth century, which we have now to consider. 

For the era of the Reformation was in one sense 
a new birth for Rome, as well as for the forces on the 
other side. It is not merely a Protestant charge, that 
the Church of Rome at this period was tiagrantly, 
perhaps fatally, corrupt. Catholic authorities, also, 
declare that its degradation was very deep, and that 
to all appearance its very existence was staked on a 
radical reformation. Both parties are agreed that the 
reform was needed. Each asserts that it was genuine 
and wholesome on its own side. Each charges that it 
was de^ptive and unreal on the other. 



THE TWO REFOKMS. 27 

But, in fact, two very genuine reformations were 
going on together, impelled by the same general mo- 
tive, though radically different in their method. We 
have seen how that which we call Protestant was 
staked on individual conviction and justification by 
faith. Even the reactionary moods in Luther's own 
life, even the surprising compromises accepted by 
Melanchthon, do not alter the main fact. Eeform 
within the Church, on the contrary, — as demanded 
by Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, — was staked on 
the reinforcing of discipline, the expanding and fix- 
ing of dogma, and the perfecting of the ecclesiastical 
system considered as a piece of religious machinery. 

Looking at the tremendous passions and obstinate 
convictions axrayed upon the field, and the life-and- 
death struggle in which they felt themselves engaged, 
nothing seems at first sight more pitiably irrelevant 
and weak than the plan of campaign laid down by 
the Catholic authorities, and developed into the weary 
technicalities of the Acts and Canons of the Council 
of Trent. 

But to judge the situation so would be a hasty 
judgment. We must still keep in view that image 
of the forces of the Church as of an Army trained in 
fixed rules of discipline, and acting under a single 
recognized command. Whatever makes that disci- 
pline more perfect, adds so much to the power of 
attack and defence. Whatever makes more clear the 
plan of the campaign which is to be fought, does so 
much to make the officers intelligent, resolute, and 
united. Whatever exalts the authority of the su- 
preme command, goes so far to make the force a 



M 



28 THE CATHOLIC REACTION. 

unit, and irresistible. Only — and here will be the 
real criticism from the modern point of view — the 
best disciplined army may be sent out into the wil- 
derness, or in the wrong direction ; and so may be 
doing only mischief, or may waste its strength in 
" fighting so as one beateth the air." 

This, perhaps, is only to say that the modern mind 
is likely to fail in recognizing the objective point which 
the Catholic strategy aims at, moving as it does on 
a different level, and towards other things. But at 
least the modern mind cannot fail to see the splendid 
perfection of that equipment, or to admire the com- 
plete discipline and devotion of that army. It may 
also grant — if it is wise as well as logical — that, 
whatever the atrocities of the method, the modern 
world could not spare this great factor in its life ; 
that society, in its common moralities and in its po- 
litical order, owes a vast debt to the modern Church 
of Eome. The new world of thought is not the only 
thing. Institutions and moralities, which are the slow 
work of civilization, float, after all, at the mercy of 
the great sea they are embarked on, which is human 
nature itself; and this is but a chaos of passions 
and desires, when not under check of one form or 
another of spiritual force. Just now, the Roman 
Church has still in reserve the greatest supply of 
that force, available for very large spaces and popu- 
lations. Among the two hundred millions of its 
nominal subjects, it is likely that her discipline is 
none too strong, and none too skilfully organized and 
handled, for the security of modern life from still worse 
catastrophes than have already overtaken it. 



FAILUEES OF PEOTESTANTISM. '29 

At any rate, that motive was urgent enough in the 
moral disorders of the sixteenth century. Whatever 
else the Eeformation had done, it had found no remedy 
for those disorders. In some directions, it had defi- 
nitely added to them — as, with a sort of dismay, 
Luther often declared. To say nothing of Antinomian 
extravagances, or the fury of the Peasants' War, there 
was an unsettlement of morals as well as beliefs, for 
which the Eeformation was clearly responsible. It 
could not fail to shock men's sense of the sanctity of 
oaths, that Luther's own marriage was the violation 
of his monastic vow. He could peril the whole cause 
of the Eeformation by his break with Zwiugli and 
the Swiss reformers on a question of ritual ; but did 
not see his way clear — setting Scripture as he did 
above the Church — to forbid the bigamy of so im- 
portant a partisan as Philip of Hesse. As a remedy 
for some of the worst evils of society, whatever it 
may have been for the cheer and strength of single 
lives, Protestantism had completely failed ; or if not 
completely, at any rate so far tliat Italy or France 
could not well be challenged to adopt the course of 
Germany, or the Church bidden to relax her rules of 
discipline as guide of the common conscience. Add 
to all this, that men's piety and reverence, which 
touch them nearer than their moral sense, were ap- 
palled by the free handling of sacred things, or things 
deemed sacred, in the incredible coarseness — beastli- 
ness is not too strong a term to use now and then — 
of the Lutheran polemics. 

So much for the negative side. And for the posi- 
tive, the Catholic reaction had in it the genuine ele- 



30 THE CATHOLIC REACTION. 

ments of a religious and moral revival. As is the 
way with every vital religious movement, it began 
with personal conviction of a definite moral evil and 
of its remedy ; with a power of personal piety and 
devotion, also, that kindled to the flame of a genu- 
ine passion, and so created the force that presently 
brought into play a new, complete, and very power- 
ful system of machinery. 

We must call to mind here what we have seen so 
often in the life of the Mediaeval Church, — its im- 
mense advantage in having close at hand, ready at 
every crisis, an organized type or ideal of the reli- 
gious life, according to its own conception of it, in 
the Eeligious Orders. The forces of any new awak- 
ening of conscience, or reform of morals, play easily 
in channels whose shape and direction were con- 
structed for them, with infinite pains and skill, while 
the Church still had the vigor of its growth. The old 
form is taken possession of by the new spirit, and 
is embarked on a new career under another name. 
Tims is saved the expenditure of force needed to 
frame itself a new body, when spirit takes on flesh. 
An institi^onal religion always has the advantage 
over free Mligion in tliis prodigious economy of its 
strength. %. 

We do «)t often reckon the enormous drain on 
vital force«feeded to create a new organization, even 
of the sii^Pest. Two thirds of the food we eat, say 
the physMogists, go merely to keep the vital ma- 
chinery iMbrder. Consider what it costs a growing 
child to At forth a single tooth, for example ; or a 
grown mdB to repair a broken bone. It is not hard. 



NEW EELIGIOUS ORDERS. 31 

perhaps, to fabricate the shape ; but to get tlie life 
into it is very hard. And it can be done only by 
vital connection, at some point, with an organization 
which is already alive. 

But the spirit must still go before the form. And 
nothing is more interesting, at the period we are con- 
sidering, than to see how the personality of a few re- 
markable men comes in just here to bridge over the 
space, and to make the revolution possible. What 
was wanted was, that religion should be as real a 
thing within the lines of the corrupt and decrepit 
Church of Eome, as in the lives of those who had 
caught the new inspiration of Keform, and were 
brought close to the very Source of all life by their 
doctrine of a personal and immediate salvation. 

The story of the organizing of a new religious 
Order is always essentially the same : intensity of 
feeling on the part of its leader or founder ; the con- 
tagion of that feeling among kindred minds ; a special 
practical aim that makes a little divergence — not too 
great — from the beaten track of existing institu- 
tions ; a shaping out of rule after the familiar model, 
but with provision for the new object in -^w ; some 
fresh device of austerer discipline, answeti^ig to the 
fervor of the motive freshly felt. All these we find 
in the case of the two new Orders which were the 
most characteristic growth of this period, the Thea- 
tines and the Jesuits. The date of the former (1524) 
shows it as emerging from the very heat and dust 
of the first conflict with the Lutheran protest. The 
date of the latter (1540) is a little after the armed 
league of Protestant nobles and the counter-league 



32 THE CATHOLIC REACTION. 

of Catholic, a little before the outbreak of those armed 
forces in the Smalcaldic war. 

In fact, a doctrine very much like Luther's had 
spread widely, and was zealously professed in Italy. 
A style of enlightened religious thought, — best known 
to us through the name of Vittoria Colonna, the friend 
of Michael Angelo, and tlirough his own religious 
sonnets, — devout, intelligent, refined, and somewhat 
austere, was in superior minds fast taking the place 
of the set forms of churchly piety ; so perilously fast, 
indeed, that the very plirase " faith in Christ," or any 
special fervor or originality of spiritual exercises, be- 
came matter of suspicion and alarm. Partly to enlist 
this force, partly to check its escape into forbidden 
channels, there emerges a sudden energy of ecclesias- 
tical reform. 

The leader in this direction was a man of the most 
austere and rigorous type of Catholic piety, — Caraffa, 
afterwards Cardinal and (1555-1559) Pope Paul IV. 
As priest and as bishop he had labored with great 
zeal to reform the morals and remove the abuses of 
his charge ; and he gained leave to lay down his rank 
and office, and give himself to the one work of found- 
ing and directing a new religious Order, — the Thea- 
tines, so called from the name of the diocese which 
he had left. 

Besides the customary vow of poverty, like that of 
other Mendicant orders, it was enjoined that these 
new brethren might not even beg. Besides the set 
office of preaching, like the Dominicans, they became 
street-missionaries, — from bench, platform, or wayside 
stone, or in the market-place, arresting the ear of the 



THEATINES. — LOYOLA. 33 

populace of Italian cities. Besides the office of con- 
solation of the sick and dying, there was the special 
duty laid on them of attending on condemned crimi- 
nals, and carrying into the dungeon the warning or 
comforting message of the Church. The new Order 
was never large in numbers. It is almost unknown 
now, except in a few localities. Its recruits were 
mostly from men of education and rank. It was 
never, like the Franciscan, broadly popular : or, like 
the Jesuit, the agent of vast enterprises for the 
Church. It interests us rather as the first strong 
effort in that direction, and as bringing into the field 
one or two marked men, who did much to shape the 
policy and guide the action of the new Eomanism. 

With the story of Loyola's early life, and his amazing 
self-inflictions, we have nothing here to do. One in- 
cident in his career, that which shows hira as the link 
between the two religious orders already named, is 
thus told by Macaulay : * — 

" In the convent of the Theatines at Venice, under the 
eye of Caraffa, a Spanish gentleman took up his abode, 
tended the poor in hospitals, went about in rags, starved 
himself almost to death, and often sallied into the streets, 
mounted on stones, and, waving his hat to invite the 
passers-by, began to preach in a strange jargon of mingled 
Castilian and Tuscan. The Theatines were among the 
most zealous and rigid of men ; but to this enthusiastic 
neophyte their discipline seemed lax, and their movements 
sluggish; for his own mind, naturally passionate and im- 
aginative, had passed through a training which had given 
to all its peculiarities a morbid intensity and energy. . . . 
* Miscellanies : "Eanke's History of the Popes." 



34 THE CATHOLIC REACTION. 

" Dissatisfied with tlie system of the Theatines, the en- 
thusiastic Spaniard turned liis face towards Rome. Poor, 
obscure, without a patron, without recommendations, he 
entered the city where now two princely temples, rich with 
painting and many-colored marble, commemorate his great 
services to the Church ; where his form stands sculptured 
in massive silver ; where his bones, enshrined amidst jew- 
els, are placed beneath the altar of God. His activity and 
zeal bore down all opposition ; and under his rule the Order 
of Jesuits began to exist, and grew rapidly to the full 
measure of his gigantic powers. With what vehemence, 
with what policy, with what exact discipline, with what 
dauntless courage, with what self-denial, with what forget- 
fulness of the dearest private ties, Avith what intense and 
stubborn devotion to a single end, with what unscrupulous 
laxity and versatility in the choice of means, the Jesuits 
fought the battle of their Church, is written in every page 
of the annals of Europe during several generations. In 
the Order of Jesus was concentrated the quintessence of 
the Catholic spirit ; and the history of the Order of Jesus 
is the history of the great Catholic reaction." 

Ignatius Loyola, a young and brilliant Spanish 
cavalier, had been grievously wounded by a cannon- 
ball in the siege of Pampeluna, early in the year 
1521. Of all the pious or romantic legends by which 
he fed his fancy during the year of extreme suffering 
while in the agony of the crude and cruel surgery he 
endured,* none can be more extraordinary or more 
romantic than the story of his own life. Its incidents 
are familiar, and need not be retold. Its results are 
all that concern us now. 

* In the course of which his shattered leg had to be rebroken 
and reset more than once, in the vain hope to straighten it. 



THE JESUITS. 35 

Modern Eomanism is something in many points 
quite different from tlie Mediceval institution which 
has occupied us before. It is commonly said to have 
in the Jesuit Order not its Champion only, but its 
Master. If this is true, at least that master appeared 
first in the guise of the humblest of servants. Besides 
the ordinary vow of obedience common to all monas- 
tic bodies, this Order must always be at the imme- 
diate service of the Papacy, in any direction, or for 
any mission, to which its members might be sent. 
Besides the ordinary of&ces of piety, a most elaborate 
system of education was developed, — on Catholic 
principles, as opposed to the free intellectual train- 
ing of the modern world; so that the Jesuits have 
become perhaps the most accomplished guild of Teach- 
ers ever known. The two vast missionary enterprises 
to the East and West — in India, China, and Japan 
on the one hand ; from Canada to Paraguay on the 
other — which are the wonder and the boast of Mod- 
ern Eomanism, are the exclusive glory of the Jesuits. 
And there is nothing in the old stories of Pagan per- 
secution, or in the martyrdoms and torments inflicted 
by religious bigotry ever since, which has not been 
voluntarily encountered — or would not be, to-day — 
by the extraordinary body of men trained and dis- 
ciplined under the rule, and fortified by the " spiritual 
exercises," of St. Ignatius.* 

It is the more remarkable that a foundation so 
fervent and so loyal should have barely escaped in 

* Of the illustrations of this which might be given, none are 
more interesting or more heroic than those in Parkman's ' ' Jesuits 
in North America." 



36 THE CATHOLIC REACTION. 

the beginning that sleepless and intolerant persecu- 
tion, of which it has been the most active agent ever 
since. The unwonted fervor, and doubtless some nov- 
elty of phrase, in Loyola's manual of devotion, caused 
him to be arrested and incarcerated at Salamanca, 
The merciless Inquisition of Spain was in full vigor 
there, and its all-suspecting vigilance detected signs 
of heresy in the book. His orthodoxy was hardly 
established, and he had but just escaped from those 
menacing fangs, when he found himself again under 
surveillance in Paris, and was three months in mak- 
ing good his claim to be a true Catholic, or tolerated 
as a defender of the faith. 

It is very characteristic of the age, the cause, and 
the man, that once arrived in Home, a little later, he 
urged upon the Pope the need of a " Supreme and 
Universal Tribunal of Inquisition," subject to uo less 
authority than the Head of the Church himself, to 
have in its charge the suppression of heresy through- 
out the world. Such a tribunal was founded in Eome, 
in the year 1542, by Pius III., a few weeks after his 
summons of the great Eeform Council which met three 
years later in Trent. Only the Spanish Inquisition, 
which for something more than sixty years had proved 
itself too faithful and efficient to be distrusted, was 
exempt by special privilege from its jurisdiction. 

And so we meet face to face, at this moment of 
crisis, the most startling phenomenon of the Catholic 
reaction. Eeformation, in its view, means a revival of 
Mediaeval piety, nourished and organized under mo- 
nastic discipline, used to strengthen the ecclesiastical 
power, and having for its method the well-understood 



THE INQUISITION. 37 

processes of the Inquisition. We must keep tliis 
latter fact in sight. An illustration or two will en- 
able us to do this more distinctly. 

The series of popes for sixty years, down to the 
massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572, from the "re- 
forming " Paul III. to the " savage " Pius V., were all 
known for some special zeal or service in the cause 
of religious persecution, — not in the mild way we 
sometimes understand that phrase, but by the horri- 
ble and sometimes literally unspeakable methods of 
misery invented by the Inquisition. 

Cardinal Caraffa, the great leader of " reform with- 
in the Church," was equally great as an inquisitor: 
at his death a Eoman mob, with ferocious joy, rushed 
to tear down the prisons of the Holy Office, with loud 
curses on his name. 

Another great and famous inquisitor, Bartholomew 
Carranza, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain, 
high in honor in the Council of Trent, — the same 
who undertook the reforming of the English Church 
under Philip and Mary, and with his own lips con- 
demned the English Primate Archbishop Cranmer to 
the flames, — himself a few years later fell under the 
sleepless and remorseless jealousy of that terrible 
Office ; was treacherously arrested ; suffered the hor- 
rors of imprisonment for eighteen years; and died 
at his release, having with difficulty established his 
soundness in the faith. 

We hear, in 1547, of a " terrific episode " in Naples, 
where the populace rose to resist the introduction of 
the hated tribunal there, and fought so furiously, that 
before night the last man of a body of three thousand 



38 THE CATHOLIC REACTION. 

soldiers sent in to quell the riot lay slaughtered in 
the street. 

To understand the fury of the English at the very 
name of Spaniard, in this time of terror, we may read 
the story of one Burton, an English shipmaster at 
Cadiz, — for the Inquisition respects no foreign flag, 
but treats heresy as a local crime, — who was seized 
on some pretence of heretical expressions, thrown into 
a dungeon, submitted to torments and threats, and 
finally burned alive at Seville (December 22, 1560). 
The story was told at length by one Frampton, sent 
out to be his advocate, who was seized in the same 
way, was put to the rack after witnessing his cli- 
ent's martyrdom, and was hardly released under con- 
dition of living in Spain under that eye of tyranny, 
but afterwards escaped. The real crime was the 
ship-master's rich cargo : the Inquisition profited by 
its seizure to the amount of fifty thousand pounds 
sterling. 

Scenes and wrongs like these prompted the great 
raids of Hawkins and Drake upon the Spanish power, 
as the common enemy of mankind ; and stirred the 
English conscience to a passion that even craved and 
courted martyrdom. For in 1581 we hear again of 
a Puritan mechanic from the south of England, one 
Eichard Atkins, who went to make his protest first 
to the Jesuit College in Eome, where lie was speedily 
delivered to the tribunal ; then, being set free, — per- 
haps as being deemed insane, — went to repeat his 
protest by assailing the idolatrous service in St. Peter's, 
well knowing the fate it would lead him to. For 
when he was paraded half-naked through the streets. 



BOKROMEO. 39 

and lighted torches were thrust against his bare flesh, 
he would grasp the torches in his hand, and hold 
them to his side, despising the pain, still exhorting 
the crowd in his broken Italian to faith in Jesus, and 
so went smiling to his martyrdom. 

Charles Borromeo is the saintliest name of this era, 
perhaps of the whole modern Church of Eome. He 
is justly held in universal reverence for the sweetness 
of his piety, the simplicity of his self-devotion, the 
fidelity of his service as ecclesiastic and archbishop of 
Milan, the untiring charity and beneficence, courageous 
and heroic as well as tender, which, shown in a season 
of plague, has made his memory forever dear and ven- 
erable. Created cardinal at the age of twenty-two, he 
found himself, four years later, appointed judge of one 
Fra Tommaso di Mileto, a Franciscan monk, charged 
with such heresies as these : the lawfulness of eating . 
meat on Friday ; doubts about image- worship and in- 
dulgences ; questioning of the Pope's authority ; hints 
of predestination, and denial of the Lord's " true body " 
in the Host. And, besides minor penalties, here is the 
sentence rendered by this tender-hearted saint : " That 
you be walled up in a place surrounded by four walls, 
wdiere, with anguish of heart and abundance of tears, 
you shall bewail your sins and offences committed 
against the majesty of God, the holy mother Church, 
and the religion of the founder St. Francis." * 

The man thus cruelly immured succeeded in mak- 
ing his escape. But not so all. For, in the ruins of 
dismantled Inquisition prisons, skeletons have been 

* Sentence rendered December 15, 1564. See Rule's "History 
of tlie Inq^uisitiou." 



40 THE CATHOLIC REACTION. 

found in like " places surrounded by four walls," nar- 
row cells, where the prisoner is supposed to have been 
confined upright, till he perished out of mere rotten- 
ness and misery. 

Into other details of the horror of these dungeons, 
such as were laid bare in Spain, and afterwards in 
Eome, we need not enter. Our business is only with 
the Institution, and with the measures it demanded 
for its defence. The reform that goes under the name 
of " the Catholic reaction " was a campaign under- 
taken against the spirit of the age, — that is, against 
the clearest religious conviction and the most in- 
trepid conscience of the time. And the measures it 
demanded were such as we have seen. The purest, 
the most pious and gentle, the most self-sacrificing 
saints of the Eeaction were compelled to do that thing 
here described. There is no need to deny their piety 
or their tenderness of heart. But their piety did not 
stick at the gigantic murder of Saint Bartholomew. 
Their tender mercies did not shrink to wall live men, 
" with anguish of heart and abundance of tears," in 
the misery of that hideous sepulchre. 

But I have said that the Church was conducting 
a campaign, and that it had in view a w^ell-defined 
objective point. It is essential to our purpose to see, 
if we can, what was the nature of that objective point 
of the campaign. We have seen something of its ar- 
senal and its weapons. We know something, througli 
later history, of the extraordinary success of its war- 
fare, in securing certain things which it really had at 
heart. We wish to know more exactly what those 
things were. 



LATER POLICY OF EOME. 41 

The completed structure of Modern Eomanism, as 
distinct from Mediaeval Catholicism, is understood to 
be the work of the Council which sat at Trent, in the 
Tyrol, at intervals from 1545 to 1563 ; including also, 
as corollary or supplement, the dogmas of the Im- 
maculate Conception and of Papal Infallibility. 

The first thing that strikes us, as we look at this 
result in a general way, is the policy it shows of a 
concentration, instead of an expansion, of the forces 
in the field. It is intensive, not extensive. Each 
definite step taken has served to narrow the field ; to 
throw off a part of the apparent force, for the sake of 
a more vigorous grasp upon that which is left. Each 
point of doctrine established has been at the cost of a 
vehement interior struggle ; it has been a triumph 
over opposition, with the risk and with the result of 
creating a great disaffected party. As long as the 
Immaculate Conception could be debated within the 
lines by Thomist and Scotist, the freedom of opinion 
was a ground of peace : since 1854, to follow the logic 
of their opinion, the great learning and strength of 
the Dominican Order should be lost to Eome. Infal- 
libility might be ever so much the legitimate goal to 
which the Church was tending; yet its triumph, in 
1870, cost it the formidable revolt signified in such 
names of learning as Dollinger, and such names of 
authority as Dupanloup. 

And yet the Church, bound " for better for worse " 
to an idea, has not hesitated. It began by inviting 
Protestant attendance and co-operation in its Council ; 
and the danger of compromises likely to follow M'as 
the chief hindrance to the Council's meeting, and the 



42 THE CATHOLIC REACTION. 

chief cause of its delays. Doubtless it hoped — like 
a political caucus — to hold those bound by its deci- 
sions who should join in its debates. And there was 
something in the strangely compromising attitude of 
the Eeformers — after Luther's death, especially, and 
under the irresolute lead of Melanchthon — which 
might justify that hope. But the concessions were 
soon found to be all on one side, — unless in such ex- 
ternals as in the very rare, doubtful, and reluctant 
allowance of the Cup to the laity. And the rigid 
fixing of its boundaries then, walled out all Protest- 
ant Europe as sharply, and with as little prospect of 
its recovery, as the previous walling off of the Eastern 
Church by the unyielding and intolerable claims of 
Eome. 

But this narrowing of its ground was really, in 
another way, a policy of strength. Like the "Old- 
School Abolitionists " in the Antislavery crusade, the 
Eoman Church has persistently denounced the least 
remonstrance or dissent within its lines ; has unhesi- 
tatingly thrown over the faithfullest of friends, the 
moment his zeal seemed lukewarm, or his loyalty in 
danger of waxing cold. The great debate of Eeason 
must be carried on within wide boundaries, and with 
open doors. The great battle of Faith must be fought 
with closed ranks, where a whisper of mutiny is death. 
A thousand blind partisans, so standing alone, are far 
stronger than the same number, increased by ten 
thousand more, who may dare question a word or act 
of the commander. 

Besides, the selfislmess of power must feel a certain 
relief at being discharged of responsibility for such 



MEASURES OF REFORM. 43 

turbulent and intractable subjects as those in the 
populations of the JSTorth. Italy, Spain, and — at 
heavy cost — France were kept within the circle of 
command. But the war in the Netherlands must 
have taught the lesson which power is so slow to 
learn; and the truce of 1609 must have been as 
welcome to the assailants as to the assailed. The 
Scottish people under such a lead as that of Knox 
and Melville, the Puritans of England represented 
not merely by their fierce seafaring champions, but 
by such poor martyrs as Eichard Atkins, multiplied 
by hundreds in every district, — such witnesses would 
give pause to the most towering ecclesiastical am- 
bition. Such men would be far more dangerous as 
rebellious subjects than as alien enemies. And there 
is reason to believe that the modern Church of Eome 
has been well content with such success as it has had, 
which it would not wisely risk for a wider sway. 

It is to the same effect when we look at the par- 
ticular measures of reform aimed at. Still we find 
the sharper drawing of boundaries, the throwing off 
of the neutral or disloyal, the tightening of the reins 
of authority. The objects to be effected we find enu- 
merated thus : to reinforce ecclesiastical Discipline 
among the clergy ; to establish Seminaries for the 
instruction of youth, with austere training — in sharp 
contrast to the Mediaeval University; to insure the 
incessant administration of the Sacraments in every 
parish, with special emphasis laid on preaching and 
auricular confession ; to insist on the personal super- 
vision of the clergy by the Bishop, to the restoring 
and enhancing of episcopal authority ; and to make 



44 THE CATHOLIC REACTION. 

more precise and ample the profession of faith, by 
authoritative exposition of the Creed, especially on 
the points then most debated, — justification, predes- 
tination, and sacraments. 

Except in the last of these — which it was the 
special business of a Council to determine — there is 
absolutely nothing here which we can regard as an 
attempt to meet the case as it lay broadly before the 
secular intelligence of the time ; nothing which indi- 
cates any attempt to win the lost ground, unless it 
might be by dint of armed conquest, when, the forces 
of the faith should be sufficiently drilled. All looks 
to holding more securely and ruling more severely 
the ground that is within the visible boundaries of 
obedience ; all looks to repelling more sharply those 
who chose to stay beyond those boundaries, and re- 
fusing more imperiously all suggestions of unity or 
peace. 

Now this harsh and uncompromising attitude may 
be taken by a power, a party, or a person, perfectly 
convinced that a given position is absolutely riglit, 
and that to yield it would be a crime. That, in fact, 
is what the language of the Church necessarily means, 
— the very point in dispute between the Church and 
its opponents. It may also be held by a power aware 
that its position is weak in point of fact and of reason, 
and can only be made strong in logic : that is, who- 
ever can be got to accept its premises may be held to 
abide by its conclusions. Either ground is sufficient 
to explain the attitude taken by the Eoman Church 
during the Catholic reaction, and held by it since. 

Virtually, this is to abandon the claim of Univer- 



MODERN ROMANISM. 45 

sality; since not tlie wildest dreamer supposes that 
the premises in question are going to be accepted by 
everybody. But, on the other hand, it is very greatly 
to brace and confirm the claims of Authority. By 
the theory of the Church, it regards all men, if not as 
the objects of its instruction, at least as the subjects 
of its rule. It demands not assent of the reason, but 
obedience of the will : at any rate, not assent first, 
and therefore obedience ; but obedience first, and then 
assent. But obedience is a moral act, and is rendered 
to the object of one's moral homage or choice. How 
to win that moral homage, or choice, has not, so far, 
entered much into the Romanist conception of reform. 

And yet there is a certain moral homage paid to 
the ministers of that Church, often in quarters we 
should least expect. The discipline of the Catholic 
reaction has had, unquestionably, a powerful effect on 
the lives of the humbler clergy, whose duties it has 
rigidly defined, and whose virtues it has energetically 
prescribed. The}^ at least, are not responsible for the 
craft of prelates, or for the atrocities which monastic 
rule has invented or put in force. Probably we shall 
never find a comparison between the morals of Catho- 
lic and Protestant countries intelligent and fair enough 
to satisfy both sides. The type, or standard, is the 
real object of comparison ; and into this considera- 
tions of race, or the " personal equation," will enter too 
deeply to give much standing-ground in common. 

But there are easily-recognized and very winning 
qualities, which have always distinguished the body 
of the lower Catholic clergy, and which have often 
been glorified in the more illustrious names of the 



46 THE CATHOLIC TtEACTION. 

Eoman Church. We must remember, it is true, tliat 
these virtues — charity, patience, humility, beueficence 
unstinted — are not inconsistent with policies aud 
acts which we recoil from witli horror. The saintly 
Borromeo was a merciless arbiter in the Couit of 
Faith. The Port-Eoyalists were advocates of perse- 
cution, as well as sufferers from it. Fenelon, that pure 
type of sentimental piety, did not hold aloof from the 
policy of Louis XIV. in expulsion or in torment of 
the Huguenots.* 

But in common, lowly, (piiet life those qualities are 
inestimable, and infinitely dear. Once fallen below 
earthly ambition and hope, there is probably nowhere 
such wide-spread and abounding consolation as may 
be, or has been, found with the parish priest, or the 
saintly bishop. I do not know that a famous French 
romancer is the best of authority on points of moral 
judgment ; but I have been more struck by the inci- 
dental and unintended testimony of Balzac to the 
reality of a certain " power that makes for righteous- 
ness " in the Catholic village clergy, than I should be 
with any amount of set argument to prove or dis- 
prove the same. 

This power, whatever of it really exists, it is fair 
enough to call one result of the Catholic reaction 
which I have attempted to describe. We must make 
generous allowance for this on one hand, while we 
remember, because we cannot help it, the horrors and 
enormities of that reaction on the other hand. We 
are not called on to pass a verdict of " guilty or not 
guilty " on the Church of that day, or on the remark- 

* See Douen, L' Intolerance de Fenelon. Paris, 1875. 



47 



able effort by which it recovered so - much of its lost 
ground, and restored so much of its diminished 
strength. The single acts, the policies, the men, are 
fit objects of our judgment. The historical phenome- 
non at large is beyond that judgment. Our only busi- 
ness is to understand it, if we can, in the circumstances 
it grew out of, and the results it led to. 

It did not defeat the Eeformation. That had its 
message to deliver, and its prodigious moral power to 
transmit to the life of the modern world. But it did 
save to modern life something of the rich and deep 
life of a remoter time, which was in danger of being 
lost. And this it did, first, by drawing from sources 
of genuine religious life within the old sanctuary 
limits ; then, by kindling with a new fervor a group 
or a series of men whose mental resource w^as equal 
to their zeal ; and finally, by fixing in institutions 
and defining by formula and confirming by discipline 
certain moral forces derived from the fading life of 
the Middle Age, which thus make an element in the 
life of the world to-day. 

There are a few ecclesiastical virtues precious, 
nay, indispensable, to mankind, the hardest of all to 
human nature, and so they are often by religious 
writers called " supernatural ; " and these it was the 
service of the Catholic reaction to hold in trust for a 
larger religion, which we have not yet lived to see. 



III. 

CALVINISM. 

CALVINISM as a system of thought has had its 
day. Two hundred years ago it was a very im- 
portant factor in the opinions of mankind : by which 
I mean, opinions of the most advanced and most 
highly instructed thinkers, — Milton, for example, 
and Eichard Baxter, neither of whom was strictly 
Calvinist in belief, while with both that system made 
the deep background of religious thought. But it is 
not too much to say now that nothing whatever of 
that importance is left. Intellectually, Calvinism is, 
so to speak, a dead issue. The real controversies of 
our time turn upon quite other points, and take no 
account whatever of it. 

I do not mean by this that Calvinism has not 
believers at the present day, — believers in profes- 
sion, and doubtless in reality, — perhaps as numerous, 
possibly more numerous, than ever. But the belief 
of advanced and aggressive thought is one thing ; the 
belief of tradition, of assent, of apology, is quite an- 
other thing. Calvinism fifty years ago was standing 
on its defence. Now, except in the writings of its 
professional apologists, or in small local controversies, 
it is never alluded to or thouglit of except as a thing 
of the past. Look through every modern review, 



A FADING BELIEF. 49 

scientific argument, work of pliilosophy, Iiistory, or 
general literature, — everything outside a narrow, 
technical, theological circle, — and scarcely its name, 
never once its dogma or its system of faith, will be 
found, except possibly as a reminiscence or an illus- 
tration. No philosophic writer of the present day 
ever thinks of the answer it gave once to the awful 
riddle of the universe, as the key to fit any one of 
those locks which bar from us the deeper mysteries 
of existence. 

I say this in advance, lest I should be suspected of 
any sectarian or polemic motive in the review I shall 
attempt to take of Calvinism as a force in history. 
As a system of thought it is dead. But systems of 
belief, once strong and great, long retain their form 
and outward seeming after the life has gone out of 
them. It is dead, — not like a human body, which 
soon moulders and disappears ; but rather like a great 
hardy tree, which was girdled near the root many 
years ago. It puts forth no new branches. JSTo green 
leaf has grown from its sap for many a spring. But 
as yet it is perished only in a few of its remoter boughs 
and twigs ; only a limb here and there has fallen to 
the ground from inner decay. Its shape is almost as 
sturdy and vigorous as ever. It gives almost as good 
shelter, to almost as many flocking under it, who look 
to it with almost as much reverence and awe as of 
old ; and the wreaths they hang upon its branches, 
or else the living vines they have twined about it, 
might almost persuade us that it is still alive. Such 
is the figure that best represents to us the condition 
in which we find Calvinism at the present day. 



50 . CALVINISM. 

My task is, therefore, not to attack it and confute 
it, but simply to see why it grew up when and where 
it did, and what were its services to mankind while 
it was flourishing and strong. For I hold those ser- 
vices to have been very great. Indeed, it seems to 
me hardly too much to say that we owe to it, on the 
whole, the best and noblest features of the last three 
centuries, including our own. Its natural counterpart 
is what we call Liberalism, Now liberalism is a very 
enticing thing. It is, we may eveu say, the necessary 
condition of the advent of that new intellectual and 
moral life which we hope will one of these days do 
even better service to mankind than Calvinism has 
done. But as yet, if we will think of it, liberalism 
has very little to boast of in what it has done, how- 
ever large its promise or its hope. Its coming we 
may take to have been inevitable, and its advance 
irresistible. Free thought found the creed of Calvin 
incredible ; free conscience found his moral doctrine 
an offence ; free religion found liis interpretation of 
the divine decrees blasphemous and intolerable. The 
Eeformatiou itself had set free a spirit that was thus 
sure, in time, to repudiate this its own most carefully 
constructed work. But, aside from this negative, 
j)rovisional, and (as we may say) inevitable service, 
liberalism has done as yet no great thing for the 
human race, as Calvinism has done. Nay, what it 
seems to have done has been rather by setting loose 
other great forces, — literature, philosophy, science, 
zeal for popular right, — which have been the real 
teachers and workers. 

Liberalism for the intellect we may take to be, like 



J 



JOIIX CALVIN. 51 

freedom in politics, a privilege, an opportunity, a right, 
possibly a duty. But it may be slothful, complacent, 
sufficient to itself; or it may be strenuous, girded for 
work, armed for battle. Only in the latter case can 
it compare itself with the great forces that have 
wrought and fought in the field of history. And of 
these forces Calvinism is to be reckoned among the 
chief 

. As to the man Calvin, and the opinions which make 
up his theological system, very few words need here 
be said. He was born in 1509, and died in 1564, at 
the age of fifty-five. Observe these dates. The first 
is the year when Henry VIII. became king of Eng- 
land; the last, the sixth of the reign of Elizabeth. 
Events on the Continent, particularly in France, are 
still more suggestive ; but they a.re less familiar to 
us, and will not serve so well. We see, then, that 
Calvin's mature years were passed among the earlier , 
preliminary struggles of the Eeformation, but before 
its smothered passions burst out, as they soon did, 
into armed conflict on a great scale. He was born 
and educated a Catholic, in a provincial town of 
Northern France; had a lawyer's professional train- 
ing, but with a strong leaning to theology ; was 
marked very early by a keen, precocious ability ; and 
somewhere about the age of twenty-three, or a little 
older, found himself a confirmed Protestant in belief. 
His special service as legislator, and in some sense 
ruler, almost dictator, at Geneva, then the city of 
refuge for opponents of the Roman Church, I need 
not dwell on ; or on that strange and cruel yet con- 
sistent act of his administration, the burning of Ser- 



52 CALVINISM. 

retus. It is only of his system of belief (sketched 
out, we must remember, at the age of twenty-six) — 
that sad, sharp, intolerant, uncompromising system 
known since by his name — that a few words are 
here required. 

The turning-points of this system are the immutable 
Divine Decrees ; the Fall of Man in Adam ; inherited 
guilt, with native universal depravity ; condemnation 
of the human race at large to endless misery ; the 
rescue of the elect by the sacrifice of Christ ; salva- 
tion by faith, in the strict technical definition of that 
phrase. These make the common ground of Protes- 
tant orthodoxy. The distinctive " Five Points " of 
Calvinism are absolute foreordination, natural ina- 
bility (corruption of the will), irresistible grace, par- 
ticular election, and perseverance of the saints. 

Here let me say that the language of Calvin on 
these points is almost verbally tliat of Paul, though 
of course with immense dilation and repetition. His 
doctrine — by his dry, positive, legal style of argu- 
ment, interpreting the record just as he would a 
statute or a will — is made out, fairly and logically 
enough, from the language of the Testament, especially 
that of the Epistles. The difference lies in two very 
important things. First, the language of Paul is that 
of a man of strong emotion, struggling with words to 
express his own religious experience, particularly his 
deep sense of contrition and dependence, — language 
which it is very dangerous to interpret by the rigid 
method of legal deduction, as Calvin has done. Sec- 
ondly, Paul nowhere brings in the imagery of heaven 
and hell, which gives such fiery and lurid emphasis 



THE CREED OF CALVIN. 53 

to the later doctrine. The doctrine of Predestination 
was also put in strong and uncompromising terms by 
Augustine, the one Catholic theologian whom Calvin 
cites constantly and with respect. But it was re- 
served for Calvin to put it fairly in the front, and to 
state all its terms unflinchingly. It cannot be given 
better than in his own words. He says : — 

" We assert, that by an eternal and immutable counsel 
God has once for all determined both whom he would 
admit to salvation, and whom he would condemn to destruc- 
tion. We affirm that this counsel, so far as concerns the 
Elect, is founded on his gratuitous mercy, totally irre- 
spective of human merit ; but that to those whom he de- 
votes to condemnation the way of life is closed by his own 
just and irreprehensible (doubtless), but incomprehensible 
judgment."* 

He frankly acknowledges that the natural heart 
shrinks from this. " I confess," he says, " it is im- 
possible ever wholly to prevent the petulance and 
murmurs of impiety." I should think so ! But, as 
we see, he takes the bull fairly by the horns. Some- 
thing may be added for effect upon the imagination 
in the frightful rhetoric of Jonathan Edwards's " Sin- 
ners in the Hands of an Angry God," or of Boston's 
" Fourfold State," but nothing of clear, definite appeal 
to the understanding. Now I venture to assert that no 
man living uses such terms at this day, with any seri- 
ous attempt to attach distinct meaning to them. Will 
any of those who talk so fluently about endless tor- 
ment, inflicted " totally irrespective of human merit," 

* Institutes, iii. 21, 7. The standard translation qualifies the 
sense by omitting the word "doubtless" (qroidevi). 



54 CALVINISM. 

say that they have ever tried to conceive even so 
much as the agony of a toothache, lasting six months 
together ? Nay, they would think it a horrible thing 
to torture a dog needlessly for a quarter of an hour. 
Possibly we might have to except some cases of igno- 
rant fanaticism, so far down in the intellectual scale 
that they never come within hearing of educated ears. 
But the common-sense as well as the common mercy 
of mankind has agreed to cover up these words, and 
the horrible images they suggest, with a decent veil of 
allusion and reserve. 

We need not at all suppose that they were so 
shocking to Calvin and his contemporaries as they 
necessarily appear to us. The whole theory of sove- 
reignty in the Middle Age was grim and cruel. If 
Eichard of England or Philip "the Good" of Bur- 
gundy would sweep his rebellious provinces with 
sword and flame, and stay his hand only when he 
had spent his strength ; if the sovereign of largest 
intelligence and finest political genius of all that 
time, Frederic II. of Germany, cut off his prisoners' 
hands and feet, put out their eyes, and so cast them 
into the fire ; if the Christian Church did the same 
thing, as far as lay in its power (witness the bloody 
fields of Bohemia and the smoking ruins of Langue- 
doc 1) — what more natural than the notion that re* 
bellion against the Almighty should be punished with 
like vengeance, and on an infinitely grander scale ? 
Calvin's hell could never have Ijeen invented in a 
democratic republic. 

Again, the penalty of treason specifically was that 
it wrought "corruption of blood." The children of 



CRUELTY AND MISERY OF THE AGE. t)5 

tlie guilty man were punished with him, or at least 
deprived of their inheritance. What more natural 
than to think that all the posterity of Adam were 
" attainted " by his guilt ? 

Again, the doom of heresy and schism — that is, 
rebellion against the spiritual power — was well un- 
derstood to be death by fire. Those who heard, as a 
daily matter of fact, of the Spanish autos da fe, of 
which the smallest incident nowadays would chill us 
with horror and stir a tempest of avenging wrath ; or 
who could stand quietly by, as they did in Geneva, 
to hear Servetus calling in his agony upon Christ, 
while his flesh was slowly crisped and shrivelled by 
fagots of green wood, — could not possibly feel the 
compunction and compassion which in a milder age 
have blotted out or at least covered up that hideous 
and blasphemous conception of Divine justice. The 
gentle Melanchthon gloried in that horrible business 
of Servetus, as a " pious and memorable example for 
all posterity ! " 

And, once more, the notion that happiness is, if 
not " our being's end and aim," at least every man's 
lawful pursuit, is quite a modern notion, never thought 
of in those days of almost universal physical wretch- 
edness. Eead of the horrors of the border wars of 
Flanders in the fifteenth century, or of those un- 
speakable miseries in the fourteenth that led to the 
outburst of the French Jacquerie; or listen to the 
pathetic simplicity of the German peasants' appeal 
in Luther's time for what to us are the merest pri- 
mary rights of every man, even the criminal, the 
savage, or the public enemy, — and you feel at once 



5G CALVINISM. 

that you are in a time not only of different facts, but 
of different conceptions of the possibilities of those 
facts. Misery, as men saw on every side, was the 
natural, inevitable condition of a great majority of 
mankind. It was an easy generalization to say it was 
the natural or inherited condition of the human race 
for all eternity. The only notion of happiness or 
blessing as resting on physical condition that one 
could get then was in the lives of the few, who, by 
a privilege that seemed arbitrary and was certainly 
undeserved, were lifted into a position which con- 
trasted with that of the vast majority almost as 
Paradise and the Pit. 

It is important to bear in mind, then, that the Cal- 
vinistic conception of the Universe was the natural, 
all but inevitable reflection, upon the vast curtain of 
Immensity, of the only condition of things which men 
had seen as real, or perhaps had even thought of as 
possible. And the same reasoning wdiich shows how 
inevitable that view was then shows also how and 
why it is impossible to-day. 

I emphasize this view of Natural Evil, as it is re- 
flected in the Calvinistic system, because it prepares 
us for that view of Moral Evil which was, after all, 
the root of the strength and tenacity we find in the 
system. Its power came, as Mr. Froude has forcibly 
shown, from its looking the facts of evil directly in 
the face ; from doing its endeavor to work up those 
facts into a theory, and set them forth in an orderly 
and consistent plan. 

After all, it is the evil in the world that wants 
asserting or accounting for, much more than the good 



IT FACED THE FACTS. 57 

in the world. That bland optimism, which we are 
so apt to associate with the name of Liberalism, 
goes but a very little way, and satisfies us only for a 
very httle while. Indeed, it is apt to lead straight to 
mental effeminacy and self-indulgence, and so rather 
to spoil us than help us for the good which it pro- 
claims. It is a doctrine which could have originated 
only among the comfortable classes in a self-indulgent 
age. It is mere mockery and insult to the miserable 
classes, or in an age of struggle and suffering. Pope 
says, — 

" And spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, 
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right." * 

The fact is, as every serious man sees, that most 
things are wrong, or at least stand in continual need 
of mending ; and that it is the very business of our 
lives, from the daily tasks of housekeeping up (or 
down), to set as many of them right as we can, not 
to recite the praises of tliem as they are. 

First of all, then, the strength of Calvinism lay in 
this, — that it faced the facts. It did not deny, it did 
not cover up, it did not explain, away. Eather, it 
exaggerated the evil, projected it upon an appalling 
scale, made it the portal and key to a universe of 
horror. Its explanation was very frightful. To the 
modern mind it is both impious and incredible. But 
it came nearer to men's thoughts then. Above all, it 
came nearer to their experience, their passion, their 

* Whatever Pope meant by this, he was at any rate a sharp 
satirist of a good many things in his own time, which doubtless 
appeared to him quite wrong. Most likely these lines are only a 
flourish, to glorify the fashionable philosophy of the day. 



58 CALVINISM. 

pain, their conflict, their fear. In this, then, — the 
terror and the pain that haunt so many of the deep 
places of human life, — it had the main foundation of 
its strength. What tenacious hold it had, we see in 
those words of sublime irony (as they come to us) 
which Milton set in the proem to his grand poetic 
exposition of that creed, whose motive is that he 
" may assert eternal Providence, 
And justify the ways of God to men ! " 

But not only, as opposed to a pious or epicurean 
optimism, it thus came nearer to men's experience. 
It came closer home to their sense of duty, too. Only 
in its degeneracy does Calvinism speak of men's being 
passive recipients of divine grace. In its age of vigor 
it meant an incessant, untiring, unrelenting war — 
war with sword in hand and hot hate and courage in 
the heart — against that Evil of which its only defi- 
nition was " enmity to God." It is most important 
of all, in considering Calvinism as a force in history, 
to see it — like Bunyan's Pilgrim, its finest imagina- 
tive embodiment — in full armor and in fighting atti- 
tude. Calvin himself was a man of incessant, restless, 
strenuous activity ; not a man to love, we should say, 
— irritable, dyspeptic, of thin acrimony, and morbid 
jealousies, and outbursts of passionate temper. Still, 
he was a man to respect in his way a good deal, and 
perhaps to fear a little. 

But we have to consider not his personal character, 
which in most men, in its infinite details, is so much 
a matter of circumstance ; rather, it is the stamp he 
put on the religion of his time, — that which closely 
allies itself with his outward activities and his thought. 



PREDESTINATION. 69 

That stamp is unmistakable. Nay, the very phrase 
" The Keligion," used in his native tongue in distinc- 
tion from the system of the Eoman Church, means, 
simply and as matter of course, the system of Calvin, 
In its very nature it is aggressive. And this means 
that it is intolerant, narrow, antagonistic, fitted to 
attack. 

ISTotice, too, that this fighting quality in Calvinism 
lies in its very fundamental dogma, of absolute Pre- 
destination. Can a serious man ever once think of 
salvation as resting on his own merit ? If he has 
been snatched as a brand from the burning, he is the 
Lord's once for all, to do with as He will. In the 
white heat of that conviction all fears, all pains, all 
scruples disappear.* He may be a mere weapon of 
vengeance — as Poltrot, to cut off the cruel and crafty 
Duke of Guise. He may be a victim of oppression — 
but as Coligny, who writes to his wife very simply of 
some fresh outrage, that so the good Lord has seen 
fit once more to try his servants. He may be a mark 
of assassination — as Orange was for years ; but utter- 
ly fearless, not taking even the simplest precaution, 
because he cannot fall till his time is come. Of that 
sword of Divine justice, which Calvinism was, we may 
say that the sharp point was the Eternal Decree, and 
that the two keen edges were Free Grace and Salva- 
tion by Faith. 

But observe, again, that it is but a weapon, unfit 
for the services of peace. When peace comes, it 

* "I had no more to do with the course pursued than a shot 
leaving a cannon has to do with the spot where it shall fall." — 
Johi Brown. 



60 CALVINISM. 

^loses its temper, and must be beaten somehow into 
a pruning-hook. The Church of England asserts 
Predestination in its Seventeenth Article ; but with 
a caveat against its dangerous use by " curious and 
carnal persons." The Synod of Dort adopts it, but 
with distinct mitigation of its rigid supralapsarian 
sense. The Westminster Assembly repeats it, but with 
a still more distinct protest against making God the 
author of evil, or impairing the moral liberty of man. 
We, for our part, think of the dogma chiefly for the 
great part it has played in human history, as " the 
sword of the Lord and of Gideon," by which the 
Midianites of that day were to be struck down. 

The spirit and nature of Calvinism, just described, 
are best seen when we consider what were the objects 
of its attack. I shall mention two. 

First, of course, was the Eoman Church itself, — 
its whole system of doctrine and ceremony, of dis- 
cipline, confession and absolution, and especially its 
claim of domination and supremacy. This Calvin 
attacked in his character as Protestant ; and it is 
curious to see, in his treatment of it, how he loses 
that clear, impassive, legal tone which marks the rest 
of his exposition, and becomes acrimonious, thinly 
vindictive, and in point of fact slightly libellous. 
There was unquestionably good reason for this. No 
doubt the Protestants believed with all their hearts 
that Eome was Antichrist : their curious phrase " the 
scarlet woman" is pretty familiarly descriptive, down 
to our day. Calvinism was the sharp edge of Protest- 
antism, and it meant attack. Considered in reference 
to some of its opinions, — such as its doctrine of the 



ITS WAR WITH ROME. 61 

Sacraments, then a very vital thing, — it may be called 
the religious radicalism of the day. And, taken so, it 
contrasts strongly with the conservative, politic, com- 
promising temper of Lutherauism, which always made 
good friends with the powers of the world, and even, 
on occasion, allied itself with Eomanism against its 
truculent and uncomfortable yoke-fellow. 

Calvinism then, first of all, found itself committed 
to an unrelenting warfare against the Pope, as " the 
Man of Sin," and all his works. To trace this in 
detail would be to tell the story of the great religious 
wars, especially in France and the Netherlands, and 
the whole history of Puritanism in England. For the 
present, and to illustrate the stern consistency of its 
logic, I will only mention that the modern theory of 
Ptepublicanism was sketched very early by a Calvin- 
ist of Geneva in a work carefully suppressed by his 
fellow-religionists, and reappeared from time to time 
among the Eeformers until it came to full vigor under 
the English Commonwealth.* Besides this, as we 
know, it was Calvinism that laid the corner-stone of 
American democracy. 

But, even without this challenge to the sovereigns 
of the day, the attitude of Calvinism was one then of 
very great daring. It was a sharp thorn in the side 
of the still mighty Empire-Church. It chose its home, 
or rather the spot for its intrenched camp, right on 
the frontier of Catholic France, right under the shadow 
of the mountains that bounded Papal Italy. Its his- 

* A sketch of the early history of the republican doctrine, and 
its connection with the Calvinists of Geneva, will be found in Isaac 
Disraeli's Life, of Charles I., vol. ii. pp. 318-3i5. 



62 CALVINISM. 

tory for forty years before the great wars came is the 
very romance and adventure of religious biography, 
as full of romance and adventure as that of the 
Sjjauiards' struggle against the Moors. In the great 
wars, especially those of the Dutch in the Low Coun- 
tries and of the Huguenots in France, what was its 
intrepid, fierce, unquenchable valor, there is no need 
to remind any who have heard the name of William 
the Silent, or Coligny, or Henry of Navarre,* whose 
battle against Eome was very literally battle to the 
death, — all three, victims of assassination directed 
by priestly hands. The one man who represents the 
largest thought and finest culture of Puritan England, 
John Milton, and the one man who represents the most 
sober and liberal opinion of the next generation, John 
Locke, can find no tolerance for papists in a free com- 
monwealth. And the Calvinists who colonized New 
England could not suffer sucli a one to live among 
them. For their young State, as they well knew, 
Poper}^ was in that day a thing of life and death. 
The other object — possibly not of conscious hos- 
tility, but of real attack — was what it is customary 
to call " the spirit of the Renaissance," or, better per- 
haps, " the Pagan Ptevival." By this we mean, in a 
very broad way, that spirit of culture, learning, art, 
refinement, and personal luxury which came in during 
the two centuries before the Pteformation, and has 
made so marked a thing in modern life. 

* Observe that I say " Heury of Navarre," not "Henry IV. of 
France," which he became after his faith had gone out of him in 
the acceptance of a creed he never believed. But he M'as still man 
enough to resist intolerance, and to be honored with the deadly en- 
mity of the Church. 



ITS WAR WITH ART. 63 

One must read the eloquent tirades of Kuskin, to 
get — in a very idealized way, and with much superb 
rhetoric — a notion of the suspicion, hostility, and 
hate which this spirit provoked, at that time of earn- 
est controversy, in all serious-minded men. Now we 
ourselves owe so much to this spirit of what is com- 
fortable, beautiful, and refined in our daily life, and 
the new passion for adornment and the finer arts of 
luxury has taken so strong hold on our generation, 
that we are apt to think of the Calvinistic protest 
against it all as merely rude and barbaric. In two 
ways, however, it was something different, and was 
necessarily a part of the war against Evil, which was, 
so to speak, the essence of Calvinism. The first was 
the way of attack upon what is called Eeligious Art, 
used mainly for the decoration of churches, and so con- 
tributing to the vitality and strength of the system 
which Calvinism assailed as the great source of evil. 
This way led to the lamentable destruction of churches, 
statues, pictures, and other decorations, under the fury 
of reforming zeal, in England, Scotland, and the Neth- 
erlands. The second was directed against the spirit of 
revived Paganism itself, as expressed in literature and 
art generally. This is what we know as Puritanism. 

Even religious Art, so called, from being wholly 
grave and serious, had become mere ostentatious 
luxury and splendor. The Eeformers could not for- 
get that the building of St. Peter's in Eome had 
occasioned that very scandal of indulgences which 
called out the first protest. The Pagan art which fol- 
lowed threw off all pretensions to sanctity, and with 
appalling frankness reproduced the most seductive 



64 CALVINISM. 

and sensual side of the Greek mythology, itself a 
degrading travesty of serious old myths of the primi- 
tive Aryan nature-worship. The trained mind of 
modern scholarship sees in those myths what they 
probably meant at first, — a sort of undisguised and 
unsophisticated poetry, dealing now with phenomena 
of earth and sky, now with what we should prefer to 
convey in physiological lectures and scientific treatises. 
But not so the emancipated thought of the sixteenth 
century, before modern popular science had begun to 
be. To this the old mythology had simply the charm 
of a certain fresh appeal to fancy, a sensuous grace 
and fascination, which long ages of monastic asceti- 
cism had covered out of sight ; which issued forth, 
to the amazement and horror of serious-minded men, 
along with the revived classic learning. 

The name of Eabelais is cited as the pioneer of 
this spirit in French letters. Its extreme degrada- 
tion is to be found in the literature of a lower period, 
which may be fitly enough characterized by that suc- 
cinct phrase of Scripture, " earthly, sensual, devilish." 
But without going down so low as that, it may be 
enough to mention tlie pictures of Correggio, as an 
example at once of the most exquisite grace that 
resides in grouping, coloring, and sentimental love- 
liness, as one sees in his fairest of Madonnas and his 
loveliest of infant cherubs ; and, at the same time, of 
a subtly insinuated charm in his Pagan compositions, 
— his Ledas, Danaes, los, — a beguilement of merely 
sensual beauty, which to the stern iconoclast must 
seem that very " lust of the eye " against which he 
had declared unrelentiuG: war. 



IT IS THE HEART OF PROTESTANTISM. 65 

In terms, I do not know that this war was ever 
outspoken against statues, pictures, and poetry, at 
least in Calvin's time. But it is plain that the Pagan 
revival, whatever its merits or its faults, had no more 
bitter and unpardoning enemy than the spirit of his 
followers. Now Art — duly limited to the fringing 
and adorning of the temple of life, or made the serious 
business of those to wdiom it is the natural language 
of thought, emotion, and fact — is a thing as good as 
it is beautiful. But as between that art which fills 
no small part of European galleries, and is fitly named 
Pagan, — as between that and the temper of mixed 
hostility and dread with which Calvinism met it, I 
have little hesitation in saying that Calvinism had 
the right. The witchcraft of that sensuous and se- 
ductive charm, and the hard, inexorable temper of 
that hostility are brought straight before us in the 
picture — so full of tender, mournful, tragical sug- 
gestion — of John Knox, stern and menacing, as he 
stands before the guilty Queen of Scots, whose femi- 
nine fears and fascinations shrink alike before the 
glance of that unpitying eye. 

The foregoing illustrations are all we have time for 
now, to show the nature and spirit of the warfare in 
which Calvinism found itself engaged. Two views of 
it are still remaining to complete the outline of it 
which I have attempted to trace. 

For the first we have the striking fact that Calvin- 
ism embodied all the aggressive, what we may call 
the positive, force of the Reformation westward of the 
Rhine. Lutheranism had in it from the start a certain 
spirit of compromise. It found its home in the North 



G6 CALVINISM. 

German courts and populations, wliere its strength is 
to this day. Anglicanism is, at its broadest and best, 
a national and not a universal religion. Socinianism 
struck too directly, with its dry rationalism, at what 
was felt at the time to be the vital centre of Christian 
life ; and its name, with whatever honor it really de- 
serves for genuine piety and straightforward honesty, 
has remained ever since a byword of reproach, dis- 
owned by Unitarians and contemned by Orthodox. 

The real strength of the Eeformation lay in about 
half of France, till it was extinguished in a cruel 
religious war, and its relics were brutally trampled 
down, both before and after the " Revocation " of 
1685 ; in the Netherlands, where it fought for fifty 
years the most obstinate and glorious fight on record, 
till it triumphed under Maurice and Barne veldt; in 
England, where Puritanism was the power behind the 
throne of Elizabeth, and its alliance of Presbyterian 
and Independent was victorious under Cromwell ; in 
Scotland, where under Knox it forbade the banns of 
papist alliance with France, and established with 
Melville the most rigid system of instruction and 
discipline that ever constrained the energies of a 
valiant, restless, hard-headed, and intelligent people ; 
in America, where the northern seaboard was held by 
a hardy and devout race of pioneers, who faithfully 
served God and man in a certain hard, forbidding 
way, held their own invincibly in the savage border- 
war waged on them by the Jesuit settlements of 
Canada, planted in little local liberties the germ of 
what has grown out into an immense political sys- 
tem, and communicated a certain astringent flavor to 



ITS SABBATARIANISM. 67 

the home-brewed piety, which you taste to-day from 
the briny waters of Maine to those of California. 

All over the spaces just indicated Calvinism has 
given the tone and type of Protestantism, so that 
even the scientific Liberalism of the present day is 
perhaps best known by its antagonism to that. This 
predominance of the Calvinistic spirit appears very 
curiously in one thing, — the Sabbatarian temper of 
all Protestant communities that have taken their tone 
from it. ISTow Calvin was by no means himself a 
Sabbatarian, in our sense. When John Knox (I have 
read) once called upon him, he found him playing a 
game of ball on a Sunday afternoon, — a thing some 
of us liberals might rather hesitate to do. In Catho- 
lic countries, Sunday — at least half of it — is frankly 
made a holiday. It is hardly different in Lutheran 
countries : at least, I remember at Dresden a popular 
fair, with wild-beast shows and shooting at a mark, 
when the weary Sunday-morning service was done. 
In Puritan New England we have gone so far as to 
open free libraries and art galleries on that day, though 
by sufferance, as it were, and under strong protest. 
Calvinism — the system, not the man — is the source 
of that sad, still, ascetic observance of the day, more 
common once than now, and of calling it strangely 
by the Jewish name of Sabbath, instead of its Chris- 
tian name of Lord's Day, or its good old heathen one 
of Sunday. It is, so to speak, the genius of the sys- 
tem, protesting in a certain blind, hard way against 
the spirit of the Pagan revival, — the spirit that re- 
joices in " the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, 
and the pride of life ; " that addicts itself to ungodly 



68 CALVINISM. 

and sensual delights ; that loves Beauty for its own 
sake, and not merely, if at all, as a symbol of some- 
thing else ; that would nmltiply the pleasures of life, 
careless of the risk of incidental harm ; that lets a 
childlike, unthinking joy in natural sights and sounds 
run too easily into an indulgence all the more danger- 
ous, perhaps, because under the ban and outside the 
sympathy of excellent, scrupulous, self-denying, joy- 
less men. 

But, again, we find Calvinism not merely as an 
austere type of piety. It is also a fountain-head of 
stern, aggressive, self-sacrificing virtue, rising often to 
the heights of moral heroism, so necessary to brace up 
the tone of morals in an age of license, and even, at a 
crisis, to save the very life of a State, political as well 
as social. Take, for one type of it, the self-devotion 
shown in the missionary enterprise : divest it of the 
horrible dogma it proceeds upon, — that the souls of 
the unconverted heathen, without it, must drop in- 
cessantly, or rather pour, in a perpetual cataract of 
eighty thousand souls a day, into the gulf of endless 
perdition, — and see it only in its spirit of endurance, 
courage, sympathy, enthusiasm, such that to a young 
man looking forward to a career it shall seem the 
higliest joy to die a martyr in tropical swamps (and 
I have myself known such) ; and where else shall we 
look for a type of character which does more honor to 
what is highest in human nature ? 

Or take, again, a movement like the Antislavery or 
Temperance crusade, — assuming, as under the con- 
ditions of human society we may fairly do, that at a 
given time and place such a crusade is necessary, — 



ITS PASSING AWAY. 69 

and where shall we find the agents and weapons for 
such a warfare, hearts hot and valiant, weapons tem- 
pered and keen, except from that enormous reservoir 
of moral power which it has been the great mission 
of Calvinism to keep from running dry ? As an 
intellectual system (as I began by saying) its day is 
long past. But as a moral force, there was never 
perhaps more need than now of the spirit it repre- 
sents. The forms of Puritanism cannot long survive ; 
but from the heart of it, even yet, are some of the 
best issues of our life. 

And this leads me directly to the last point of which 
I propose to speak. The system of Calvinism is cer- 
tainly destined to pass away, and possibly before very 
long, in the revolutions of liuman thought. I do not 
think it needs any argument to show this to a thought- 
ful and observant person, and I shall offer none. But, 
if we will think of it, its passing away is a very serious 
thing, and one not altogetlier, perhaps, to be received 
with cheers and shouting. That depends greatly on 
what is coming to take its place. Now I am as far 
as possible from any partiality to the scheme itself. 
I learned early in childhood to dread and dislike the 
mean temper of petty persecution it had run into, to 
think of it as the one thing to be resisted in the field 
of religious thought. It is only by reflection and a 
wider view of things that I have come to see it in the 
light I have attempted to throw upon it. This shows 
bearings in the matter not so clear before. 

There are three great Scottish names, which may 
stand for three phases of the very difl&cult question I 
have tried to state. 



70 CALVINISM. 

A hundred years ago, in Scotland, Calvinism had 
run out, in many quarters, into a dry, intolerant dog- 
matism, hard alike to all free thinking and to all free 
joy in life. It was little past the middle of the life 
of Robert Burns, then a youth of twenty-one, with 
sixteen years yet before him to live as a man. We 
know what that system made of him : the bitter pro- 
test, the pitiless satire, the mocking imbelief, all hot 
from an honest heart ; and, along with them, the dis- 
repute, the loss of self-respect, the reckless indulgence, 
that clouded and blurred his splendid genius, until he 
died in early manhood, discarding and discarded by 
the austere creed that had been the glory and strength 
of Scotland in her heroic days. To quote the pathetic 
language of his biographer, who is also both his eulo- 
gist and his countryman, — 

"He has no religion. In the shallow age where Lis 
days were cast, religion was not discriminated from the 
New and Old Light forms of Eeligion, and Avas, with 
these, becoming obsolete in the minds of men. His heart, 
indeed, is alive with a trembling adoration ; but there is 
no temple in his understanding. He lives in darkness, 
and in the shadow of doubt. His religion, at best, is an 
anxious wish, — like that of Eabelais, a great Perhaps." 

A few years later, we have the illustrious example of 
Thomas Chalmers, — in religious energy, after Knox, 
probably the greatest son of Scotland. With him, 
after a period of mere formal belief, the system came 
home with personal conviction ; and all the force of 
his powerful nature went out into the glorious work 
he did in his Glasgow parish of twenty thousand 
souls, — one of the grandest proofs of what moral 



THREE SCOTTISH NAMES. 71 

forces were latent there, allied with the ancient faith, 
and of what one live strong man can do for men. 

Again, after one more generation, we have the 
shrewd thinker, the sad humorist, the cynical phi- 
losopher, the marvellous expounder of history, the 
vigorous declaimer against all sorts of mental effemi- 
nacy and self-indulgence, the despairing prophet of 
England's future, Thomas Carlyle, — whose deeply 
religious nature still keeps loyal to the memory of 
his early faith ; who refuses to think of religious 
things except in the phrases and formularies of the 
Calvinism he has outgrown ; whose immense range 
of culture makes his old beliefs impossible, while the 
stern, sad tone of them survives in the bleak pessi- 
mism, the disdain of human weakness, the haughty 
deference to a mere mighty or else almighty Force, 
that have given him his unique place among men of 
letters. 

I bring these names together not for their likeness, 
but for their unlikeness, yet all as illustrations of what 
we have to think of when old things are passing 
away and all things are becoming new. They bring 
straight before us, in a threefold way, the variety of 
influences that may flow out from a system nominally 
one. They suggest what will perhaps appear, if we 
think of it, the gravest question a thinking man can 
ask himself, — how, in parting from outgrown and 
pernicious error, we may yet keep the Truth, which 
converts the soul and saves the world. 

Of those three greatest Scottish names of the last 
hundred years, — greatest, certainly, as representing 
personal or moral force, — the first was unquestiona- 



72 CALVINISM. 

bly the finest genius. The second was noblest in 
personal character, and of best — at least, most de- 
voted — service to his own immediate generation. 
But of Carlyle this in particular may be said : that 
his is at once the most powerful and the manliest 
influence that has gone out upon the English mind 
of our time. Sometimes, indeed, it seems hard to 
imagine what form or degree of effeminacy might 
not have held the field but for that one influence. 
Wrong-headed, violent, eccentric, unjust at times, his 
voice has rung like a trumpet against everything cow- 
ardly, degenerate, and base. Scornfully intolerant of 
religious bigotries, hypocrisies, and false pretensions 
of every sort, his prodigious personal force has always 
weighed, if not for the gentler humanities, at least 
against the cruel inhumanities, of modern life.* That 
wholesome, bracing, pungent, northern air has swept 
before it many a reeking fog and poisonous exhala- 
tion. And when we think of the manliest and sound- 
est word that is spoken to-day in the English tongue 
on any one of the great questions that lie open, — po- 
litical, moral, philosophical, religious, — we think first 
of " Past and Present," of those marvellous Histories, 
of those volumes of Carlyle's " Essays ; " and to these 
we add the small but vigorous group that, with some- 
thing of his wilfulness, have showed something also 

* It is a pity to have to except from this the ignorant and con- 
temptuous tone in which Carlyle always spoke of American slavery, 
and of our civil war. Still, something may be pardoned to his 
hatred of that cant to which such distant issues were nearer than 
the sufferings and inhumanities close at home. And Carlyle's hon- 
est hostility was at least better than Kingsley's surprising conver- 
sion when the crisis came which he had just been preaching to us 
to meet like men. 



CARLYLE. 73 

of his strength, — among them Charles Kingsley, and 
John Euskin, and James Anthony Fronde, and Ealph 
Waldo Emerson. 

I would not go to Carlyle — so far as I know or 
care — for a single opinion upon any topic, or for 
sound judgment on any historical person or event. 
Mere contact with that powerful intelligence is the 
one sufficient thing. It illustrates better than any- 
thing else I can call to mind the immortal soul that 
survives from a body of opinion intellectually dead. 
Such mental virility is one more item of the great 
debt our generation owes to the faith which nurtured 
it and made it possible. It confirms the hope that, 
while the system associated with the name of Calvin 
must pass away, the mental vigor, the moral courage, 
the intolerant hate of Evil under all disguises, the 
stern loyalty to Truth, will yet remain, an imperisha- 
ble possession of mankind. 



IV. 
THE PUPJTAN COMMONWEALTH. 

COMMONWEALTH is good old English for that 
later and much abused word " Eepublic," which 
hardly once appears * in the writings of the time 
we are considering. And it expresses, better than 
any other term, the oneness of life, the community 
of interest, the reciprocity of rights and duties, what 
in modern pjhrase we have learned to call the "soli- 
darity," of the State. The term " Commonwealth " is 
therefore as near a rendering as we can easily get, 
from the modern, human, or political point of view, of 
the old religious phrase " Kingdom of Heaven," which 
made the first Christian ideal of human society. 

It is probable that the complete break-down of the 
Mediaeval theory, which sought to realize this ideal by 
its splendid fiction of a universal Empire-Church, had 
much to do with the suddenness and the passion with 
which this new ideal, at once political and religious, 
took possession of serious minds. That "the king- 
doms of this world should become the Kingdom of our 
Lord " was no longer possible, nor could it be even 
hoped for, under the old ecclesiastical rule. 



* " Republic " is cited as used in poetry by Drayton and by 
Jouson. It is not found in Shakspeare, who uses the word " 
mou wealth" or its ei^uivalent "commonweal" nearly forty times 



Ben 
com- 



UTOPIA. 75 

And so, as soon as the fury of ecclesiastical strife 
had abated, before the faith in a divinely revealed 
order of government had waned, there grew up, nat- 
urally, a form of opinion which held that the con- 
stitution of human society itself must be avowedly 
religious, and Jesus Christ the only rightful king. 
So he had been proclaimed by Savonarola in Florence ; 
and so Antinomian and Anabaptist fury had declared, 
with savage fanaticism, in the era of the Eeformation. 
It was a natural sequel that, when Puritan Eeform 
had once got the ascendency in England, the name in 
which it proclaimed itself was "Commonwealth;" and 
its most consistent zealots, the Fifth Monarchy Men, 
"looking on the Covenant as the setting Christ on 
his throne, seemed," says Burnet, "to be really in 
expectation every day" when He should personally 
appear. 

Besides, the great discoveries that came just before 
the time of the Eeformation had stimulated men's 
imagination, as well as widened the visible horizon. 
The New World invited out their fancy, to play in 
dreams of a social state pure from the violences and 
wrongs with which the Old World was too familiar. 
More's " Utopia " and Bacon's " Atlantis " are both in 
the vague wonderland beyond the sea.* These dreams 
are crude and vague, as we might expect. The com- 
munism of Utopia, which is a sort of humanitarian 
Sparta, is upheld by such innocent devices as making 
gems into children's baubles, and fabricating from the 

* It is curious to note that in "Utopia," wlucli was written while 
the discoveries were very fresh, Americus Vespucius is the recognized 
explorer, while Columbus is quite unknown. 



76 THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH. 

precious metals vessels of dislionor and chains for 
slaves. But there are noble and kindly thoughts of 
a State which (as our modern States profess) should 
feed the poor, cure the sick, and care for the public 
health ; while, in contrast to the ecclesiastical terror 
under which men groaned, perfect freedom of con- 
science is a fundamental right of every man. 

The ideal Commonwealth, as distinct from the po- 
litical forms of a Eepublic, happens to have had a 
peculiar fascination for the best English minds. Per- 
haps it is easier to idealize the life of a nation so 
completely rounded and separated in its boundaries 
as Britain. Shakspeare often makes us think so, in 
his splendid appeals to the honor and pride of Eng- 
land. And in this Shakspeare is the voice of that 
great age of national uplifting in which he lived. 
Moral idealism, however, was no part of Shakspeare's 
faculty, and to anything like religious heroism he felt 
a distinct repugnance. He nowhere shows human 
character on anything so high a level as we see it in 
some of his great contemporaries, — Sidney, Orange, 
and Coligny, to say nothing of those humbler country- 
men of his, the Puritan martyrs. His hero-prince was 
the vindictive persecutor of the Lollards, as well as 
the truculent and unscrupulous invader of France. 
It was martial and feudal England that kindled his 
fancy, not any large dream of what England might 
come to be, as a land of organized liberty and justice, 

" Where freedom broadens slowly down 
From precedent to precedent." 

For that, we go to a class of minds less poetic and 



AN ARISTOCEATIC EEPUBLIC. 77 

impassioned, more vigorous and masculine, dealing 
more closely with the outworking of the nation's 
political and social life. 

Quite in contrast to the way in which the idea of a 
Commonwealth was afterwards worked out, we find it 
first illustrated in a series of aristocratic names. Sir 
Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney,* Sir Walter Ealeigh, 
and Sir Francis Bacon are the men we should have 
to study, if we would learn the earlier phases which 
that idea took in English thought. These names, at 
first view, represent the pride and vigor of a ruling 
class, much more than they do the popular sympathy 
or the religious ardor which proved the working forces 
in that field. 

And their fortunes were singularly apart from any 
such achievement. More died a martyr of his fidelity 
to the Pope against the King. Sidney perished the 
victim of ill-advised bravery on a petty foreign field. 
Bacon " chose all learning for his province," and be- 
came a great light to the secular understanding of 
his age, strong to think and very weak to execute. 
Ealeigh was kept for those years of his life which 
should have been his noblest and best close prisoner 
in the Tower, and at length lost his head, partly (it 
would seem) on suspicion of the bigoted and jealous 
James, that he had schemed an aristocratic Eepublic 

* This motive in Sidney is best seen in his Letters, especially that 
addressed to Walsingham. One who has attempted to traverse the 
tiresome pathways of his "Arcadia " is surprised to learn that it is 
"a continual grove of morality, shadowing moral and political re- 
sults under the plain and easy emblems of lovers." This at least 
shows what Sidney's character and motive were believed to be by 
those who knew him. 



78 THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH. 

which should set aside the ill-omened succession of 
the House of Stuart.* 

It is, indeed, tempting to reflect what the history 
of England might have been with Ealeigh for an 
earlier Lord Protector ; if that evil succession had 
been set aside for a brilliant secular Republic, whose 
constitution-maker had been Bacon, its poet Shak- 
speare, and its executive chief the heroic Prisoner 
himself. And something of this, it is not impossi- 
ble, may have been among the thoughts of his long 
captivity. 

It is this same aristocratic tradition, strong against 
the divine right of Monarchy, which we find long 
after in Harrington, whose " Oceana " is a hardly dis- 
guised England of the Commonwealth, — under an 
idealized Protector, —7 resented by the real Cromwell 
as a lecture of political pedantry aimed at him ; and 
in that haughty and choleric scion of nobility, Alger- 
non Sidney ,f who speculated at large, under the Res- 
toration, of the supreme authority of Parliament above 
any King, — speculations which brought him to the 
block in 1683. Cromwell, says Burnet, J " studied to 

* "At a consultation at Whitehall after Queen Elizabeth's death," 
says Aubrey, " how matters were to be ordered, and what ought to be 
done, Sir Walter Raleigh declared his opinion, 't was the wisest way 
for them to keep the staff in their own hands, and set up a Common- 
wealth." — Ealeigh : Works, vol. viii. p. 740. 

t A characteristic anecdote of him is that, when in France, a 
very fine horse he rode attracted the eye of King Louis, who offered 
a generous sum for its purchase. Refusing this, and seeing that the 
wilful king would have liis way, he dismounted and shot the horse 
through the head, saying that the noble creature had borne a freeman 
hitherto, and should never be the slave of a despot. 

J in the " History of his own Times." 



THE COURT AND THE PURITANS. 79 

divide the Commonwealth party among themselves, 
and to set the Fifth Monarchy Men and the enthusi- 
asts against those who pretended to little or no re- 
ligion, and acted only upon the principles of civil 
liberty, such as Algernon Sidney and Harrington." 

But these proud and great men did not gu-ess the 
forces which were preparing to give a triumph to the 
revolutionary idea, which they could imagine as little 
as they could share. The Eeformation had been taken 
very much to heart by the English people, in a form 
which the sovereigns of the Eeformation regarded 
with about equal alarm, jealousy, and contempt. The 
Lollards had had their early martyrs under the writ 
" for burning heretics," passed by the House of Lan- 
caster, and cruelly put in force by the House of Tudor. 
Before Elizabeth had been six years on the throne, 
the name " Puritan " began to be known in something 
of the sense, political as well as religious, which made 
it afterwards so formidable. Elizabeth doubtless dis- 
liked the Puritans more, though she happily feared 
them less, than she did the Papist conspirators against 
her life. She knew, she said, what would content the 
Papists ; but never knew what would content the 
Puritans. Whitgift, her "little black husband" as 
she called him, schemed and partly effected an Eng- 
lish prelacy as arbitrary and despotic as that of 
Eome. And she thought, no doubt, to checkmate 
the rising spirit of Eepublicanism, as much as to 
maintain the divine right of the Queen she had be- 
headed, when she signified that the crown must pass 
to James.* 

* Sometime towards the end of her life clieers had been given 



80 THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH. 

The visionary aristocratic Commonwealth at once 
collapsed. Whatever hopes the Puritan party may 
have had in a king of Presbyterian training were 
suddenly crushed at Hampton Court (1604), where 
James conceived and uttered his famous phrase, " No 
bishop, no king." Ej)iscopacy became more and more 
the fast ally of Monarchy, leading straight to the 
"Thorough" policy of Laud and Wentworth (1629- 
1641). To Laud's phrase "Thorough" the Puritans 
soon opposed their own " Eoot-and-Branch." Parties 
so minded have not long to wait for a cause of quar- 
rel ; and the Presbyterians were the first to declare 
openly against the King. 

But behind the political conflict which drifted fast 
towards the Great Rebellion was the religious motive, 
kept fresh and hot by sharp repressions on one side, 
increasing fanaticism on the other. The Presbyteri- 
ans would have made a party of aristocratic reform, 
vigorous and resolute for political ends, but loyal, if 
possible, to the King. True Puritanism, with its in- 
tensity of religious zeal, and its contempt of precedent 
and consequence, went over more and more to the 
ranks of the Independents. 

The Independents, as Bacon in his large intelligence 
had regarded them, were " a very small number of very 
silly and base people, here and there in corners dis- 
persed." The large intelligence, which had taken all 
knowledge to be its province, was quite blind to that 

for the Queen and State : " this the Queen saw and hated." — Dis- 
raeli : Life of Charles I. chap. xii. The great struggle for the in- 
dependence of the Netherlands was having its effect on the English 
popular imagination. 



THE PLYMOUTH COLONY. 81 

power (not of knowledge but of faith) which consists 
in the fervent heat of religious conviction, not in the 
dry light of human science. In another generation, 
the " very silly and base people " had grown so as to 
furnish regiments of Ironsides, which triumphed un- 
der Cromwell at Naseby and Marston Moor, in 1645 ; * 
and from that date Puritanism was master of the field 
for fifteen years. 

One of the " corners " into which Independency had 
been dispersed, was that obscure birthplace of our 
Pilgrim Colony, Scrooby in Nottinghamshire, w^hence 
the persecuted congregation fled to Holland in the 
early years of James (1608). It was just when the 
successes of the Netherlands forced Philip of Spain 
to a twelve years' truce, which gave great hope not 
only of peace but of religious liberty. When the 
wiser heads, such as Barneveldt's, saw the ominous 
approach of the dreaded war which was to afflict 
Europe for thirty years, — perhaps, too, we may add, 
when the Synod of Dort, by its condemnation of the 
patriot Barneveldt, showed that religious liberty was 
no longer to be hoped for, — it was time for the little 
congregation to plan and carry out its daring winter 
migration to America. 

The fortunes of the Plymouth Colony would take 
us too far from the path we have to follow. Only it 
should be said, just here, that that Colony was strictly 
in the line of advance which the best religious thought 

* This is the date given by Hallam for the first appearance of 
republican ideas in Parliament. But, as bis words imply, the idea 
of the Commonwealth, both political and religious, is much older 
than that. 



82 THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH. 

of England was making towards a Commonwealth. 
It was meant to effect " the practical part of Kefor- 
mation." Its motive was not simple freedom of wor- 
ship, as is sometimes said, but to create " a civil body 
politic." Its tirst corporate act was not ecclesiastical, 
but political : it was to form that " Covenant " which 
was, in fact, the earliest formal organizing of Democ- 
racy. The powerful attraction of this idea is seen in 
the fact that the task of colonizing was virtually com- 
pleted within twenty years ; and the vigor and effect 
with which it was done is seen in the fact that from 
those who came then were born (it is reckoned) no 
less than a third of tlie entire population of the 
United States as it existed before the Civil War. 
The tenacity of purpose which carried the nation 
through that awful struggle in our own day was in 
the most literal sense the strain of the same blood 
that flowed in the Puritan Commonwealth of Crom- 
well. 

The governing idea on both sides the ocean, quite 
as much republican as religious, meets us constantly 
in the early records of New England. We find it in 
the incessant reference to Christ — not the Church — 
as the real authority in religious things. We find it 
in a certain jealousy of clerical control in matters of 
general concern, — as marriage, which is made a civil 
contract, not a sacrament. It is political sagacity, 
quite as much as any particular intensity of religious 
feeling, which prescribes tliat the infant Common- 
wealth shall be not only Christian, but Congregation- 
al ; which identifies citizenship with church-member- 
ship; which even goes into the sphere of personal 



NEW ENGLAND CONGREGATIONALISM. 83 

religion, by demanding a declaration of "the work 
of grace " from every candidate for the political fran- 
chise. It was the apprehension of civil disorders 
which, growing out of sectarian division, might be 
fatal to the Colony, — not ecclesiastical bigotry and 
oppression, — that checked the rising rage of contro- 
versy by the cruel exile of Ann Hutchinson and 
Eoger Williams, and afterwards of the Quakers. 

It was, again, the spirit of Independency that took 
the alarm, when the Presbyterian party, victorious in 
Parliament, undertook to found a national establish- 
ment, in which the church-polity of the Covenant with 
Scotland should be enforced upon all subjects and 
colonies of England ; and that, to foil what it deemed 
a dangerous plot, sent its envoys into England, where, 
in 1645, they joined hands with the Independents, 
just now victorious under Cromwell. 

Thus Congregationalism remained the established 
Order, in State as well as Church, till in 1662 the 
new Charter of Charles II. required that all should 
be recognized as equal citizens who were " orthodox 
in their religion, and not vitious in their lives." Even 
in our own day, and since the disappearance here of 
the last relic of the ecclesiastical establishment in 
1833, something of the old jealousy remains, which 
has prevented the Presbyterian Order from gaining 
any strong foothold in ISTew England ; and the name 
Commonwealth still remains the of&cial title of the 
two oldest of our States.* 

* Massachusetts and Virginia. It will be noticed that the latter 
in its history represents the aristocratic republicanism of Raleigh, 
as the other does the religious democracy of John Robinson. 



84 THE PUKITAN COMMONWEALTH. 

But the Commonwealth, as an outgrowth of the 
Reformation, does not belong to England alone, or to 
the party we know as Puritan. It was in a broader 
sense the spirit of that revolutionary age. The be- 
ginnings of Democracy in Europe have been referred 
to Calvin's " Discipline," which displaced the old aris- 
tocratic rule in Geneva, and was carried over by John 
Knox into Scotland. One might even plausibly sup- 
pose that it had an earlier origin yet, and was allied 
with some tradition of the stormy democracy of the 
Italian and Flemish towns in the Middle Age. Its 
new birth, at any rate, was due to the immense re- 
ligious revival, and to the revolutionary passions of 
the century of the Eeformation. The Peasants' War 
and the disorders of the Anabaptists had brought to 
the front a complete code of democratic socialism in 
Luther's time, which with much pains had been blood- 
ily suppressed. These were among the earliest first- 
fruits of the new liberty. 

In France, the Protestant cause had kept on living 
terms with the Monarchy till the fatal date of 1559, 
when the kings of France and Spain entered into 
their secret treaty for its extirpation,* and the ill- 
concerted plot of Amboise in the following year, which 
gave the Court its pretext for cutting off the chief 
heads of that cause. As early as 1574 — stimulated, 
no doubt, by the monstrous murder of St Bartholo- 

* This was the famous treaty of Cateau-Cambresis, whose secret 
was unwarily betrayed to William of Orange, and his wary keeping 
of the secret earned him the celebrated title of "the Silent." See 
Motley's " Dutch Republic," and Baird's " History of the Rise of 
the Huguenots of France." 



THE HUGUENOTS. 85 

mew — writings were widely circulated in France, 
questioning or denying all royal authority, except 
what was founded in the public good* It may have 
been by royalist reaction, or it may have been a bitter 
satire on the maxims of monarchy in that day, when a 
counter-memorial, addressed to Catherine de Medicis, 
set forth the methods of a perfect despotism on the 
model of Turkey, — a despotism which would sup- 
press all class privileges, reduce all subjects to an 
absolute level, and admit no right of property, even, 
in private hands ; asserting that all wealth should 
(as in the imperial times of Eome) belong in full 
ownership to the king.-f* These symptoms, emerging 
amidst the wars of religious passion, and the terrors 
of conspiracy and massacre, show that dissensions 
perilously radical, touching the very source of justice 
and the foundation of authority, were fast coming to 
the front. 

One effect of these dissensions was to foment that 
obstinate feud between the Court of France and some 
of the most powerful nobles which gave the Huguenot 
party its military chiefs, which made it distinctly a 
political as much as a religious party, which intoxi- 
cated it with the dream and the fatal ambition of 
creating a Eeformed Eepublic by partition of the 
realm, or even by league with Spain. It is not likely 
that any of these noble chiefs — the Bourbons, the 
Eohans, and the Condes — cared much for the Eefor- 

* See De Thou, book Ivii., chap. viii. 

t Disraeli thinks that the proposal was "hitter satire." But it 
does not go at all, in theory, beyond the doctrine asserted by the 
** thorough " advisers of Charles I. See Hallam, chap. viii. 



86 THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH. 

iiiaLion religiously : in a generation or two these great 
Houses were frankly in alliance with the Eoman 
Church. For forty years or more, however, the Pro- 
testant cause in France aimed distinctly at a republic, 
both military and aristocratic, — which at one time it 
seemed fairly to have established, when the murder 
of Henry IV. left that for their only chance. But 
Richelieu's policy — unity of France and suppression 
of the nobles — was carried out with that appalling 
severity and craft which soon paralyzed all enemies 
of the Monarchy ; and the kingdom lay disarmed be- 
fore such exercises of royal policy as the Revocation 
of the Edict of Toleration in 1685. 

The political by-play between the courts of France 
and England, and the dread of something very like 
a popish league between the two, must count for 
something in the deadly wrath and suspicion of the 
Reforming party, which drove Charles from all his 
defences, and forced the issue of a Puritan Common- 
wealth. The parliamentary leaders would have been 
satisfied with their defeat of Royalty in the death of 
Strafford. The Presbyterian clergy would have been 
satisfied with their defeat of Prelacy in the death of 
Laud. But the Independents had another end iu 
view. The execution of the king was closely followed 
by the suppression of the House of Lords, and the 
lodging of all power with the Commons, — which soon 
proved the supremacy of the Army and of its plebeian 
Chief. 

We have nothing here to do with the political story, 
or with that crafty policy of Cromwell which suffers 
in our esteem by nothing more than by what Carlyle 



MILTON. 87 

meant for its vindication, — the bare assertion of un- 
scrupulous and remorseless will. The real vindica- 
tion of Cromwell is partly a great name which, like a 
bonfire, shines with a clearer blaze as you get farther 
away from it ; but, still more, that he kept to the last 
the steady admiration and esteem of the one man who 
represents to us in all its splendor the political and 
religious ideal of his day, and has left to the great 
Protector, for all after time, the verdict of that grand 
phrase, " Our Chief of Men." 

Milton is one of the few heroic names in literary 
history. Both in the romance of his early verse and 
in the lofty severity of his great poem, he is naturally 
compared to Dante. But his real greatness, more dis- 
tinctly and far more purely than that of Dante, is in 
the sphere of action, — not in active politics, and not 
in the field, but in acting through his writings upon 
the mind and temper of his time. There is no other 
great name in letters that would suffer so much in- 
justice if judged mainly by literary standards. Liter- 
ature, as such, he distinctly renounced, when it came 
to the deliberate choice of the work of his manhood. 
All the splendid promise of his youth ; the personal 
gifts that made him welcome among the best poets 
and scholars of his time, in Italy as well as England ; 
the scholarly culture, fostered by his father's wise in- 
dulgence, ripe and deliberate as few young men have 
ever had the mind or time for ; the accomplishments 
of the day, including music, and such skill in fencing 
that "the lady of his college" (as for his shapely 
beauty he was called) could give a good account of 
himself with his weapon " to a much stouter man," 



88 THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH. 

he says, if he had been wantonly attacked ; the am- 
bition and the dream of his early life, that he " might 
perhaps leave something so written to after-times, as 
they should not willingly let it die," — all this was 
his, only to enhance the value of the gift he brought, 
when he made haste to offer his life to the service of 
the nation. He had "determined to lay up as the 
best treasure and solace of a good old age the honest 
liberty of free speech from his youth." * 

In all literary biography there is probably not an- 
other example so splendid, of the sacrifice which a 
mind so trained must find it hardest of all to make. 
The five years following his college life had been spent 
" in the quiet and still air of delightful studies ; " and 
that rare training was to be completed now by some 
years of travel upon the Continent, especially in Italy 
and Greece. He was still in Italy, where he was taken 
at once to the heart of the most noble and cultivated 
circles ; and Athens, still glorious with tlie undimin- 
ished splendors of the Parthenon, was waiting to be 
visited, — when the news came that the struggle had 
begun which was to lay the foundation of a free Com- 
monwealth in England.-|- It is in referring to this 

* The autobiographical hints in which ]Milton speaks with an 
unreserve which few authors have ever ventured, are in the Intro- 
duction to the Second Part of " Reasons of Church Government 
urged against Prelaty " (1641), and in the " Second Defence of the 
English People," composed in 1654, after his blindness. The symp- 
toms of his blindness are described in the fifteenth of his " Familiar 
Letters." 

t "While desirous to cross over into Sicily and Greece, a sad 
message from England of civil war called me back. For I held it 
base to be travelling at ease, for my own fancy, when my countiymen 



MILTON. 89 

time — when the dreams of youth must be harshly 
put aside for the tasks of manhood — that Milton 
uses those remarkable words to define the nature of 
the call he was obeying : " But when God commands 
to take the trumpet and blow a dolorous or jarring 
blast, it lies not in man's will what he shall say, or 
what he shall conceal." 

He was now (1639) at the age of thirty-one ; and 
for more than twenty years — that is, throughout 
the vigor of his manhood — all his thought, all his 
strength, and finally his eyesight, were deliberately 
given up to what he regarded as a sacred service. 
Anxiously as he was warned of blindness by his 
friends, he would not, he says, " have listened to the 
voice of ^sculapius himself, but to a diviner monitor 
within." To enable himself to do his task with hon- 
est independence, he undertook the very uncongenial 
drudgery of instructing boy-pupils in his own house, 
where his irascible and haughty temper. Dr. Johnson 
thinks, made the charge about equally painful to 
master and pupil.* It is this laborious life, chosen 
and lived for years, till the Commonwealth appointed 

at home were fighting for liherty. " — Defensio Secunda. This was 
in 1639. War was not actually on foot till three years later. The 
terms he uses are, however, explicit : belli civilis nuntius, 

* The Puritan temper in such self-denials is pleasantly given in 
Morse's Memoir of J. Q. Adams: "The fact that such action in- 
volved an enormous sacrifice would have been to his mind strong 
evidence that it was a duty ; and the temptation to perform a duty, 
always strong with him, became ungovernable if the duty was ex- 
ceptionally disagreeable." 

Milton, says Aubrey, " pronounced the letter r very sharp, — a 
sure sign of a satirical disposition." 



90 THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH. 

the obscure but eloquent sclioolmaster for its Latin 
Secretary of State, which makes the true commentary 
of those lines in Wordsworth's noble sonnet : — 

" Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart : 
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea : 
Pure as the naked heavens — majestic, free — 
So didst thou travel on life's common way 
In cheerful godliness ; and yet thy heart 
The lowliest duties on herself did lay." 

Milton is our highest example of a consecrated in- 
tellect in the field of letters ; and it will not be amiss 
to copy here, familiar as they are, the lines in which 
he has recorded the earlier and the later form of his 
consecration. The earlier is in the flush of his young 
hope, at the age of twenty-three : — 

" Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow. 

It shall be stiU in strictest measure even 

To that same lot, however mean or high, 

Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven. 

All is, if I have grace to use it so, 

As ever in my great Task-Master's eye." 

The other is what he had learned to say in the calm 
but stern composure of later years, in blindness, old 
age, desertion, penury, and pain : — 

" God doth not need 
Either man's works or his own gifts. Who best 
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state 
Is kingly : thousands at his bidding speed, 
And post o'er land and ocean without rest. 
They also serve, who only stand and wait." 

There is no author, again, w^hom it is more neces- 
sary to judge by that ideal which he kept so loftily 
pure, which he worshipped with so absolute a homage, 



MILTON. 91 

and so austerely true a consecration. For, as soon as 
we judge him by any common standard, we find that 
this heroic temper has its faults, which give the un- 
friendly critic only too easy a handle. His political 
writings, it must be confessed, are often turbulent, 
unreadably tedious, even virulent sometimes, under 
tlie stress of personal controversy as it was then 
carried on. Something of this last may be pardoned, 
when we remember the insults brutally cast against 
his blindness, and the calumny that wantonly assailed 
his morals. 

We do not expect, either, to gain political instruc- 
tion from such a mind. " His scheme of government 
is that of a purely ideal Commonwealth, and has the 
fault common to the greater part of such conceptions, 
that it never could be practised except among beings 
for whom no government at all would be necessary." * 
It is just as well to begin by admitting thus much, so 
as to clear the way for recognizing the qualities which 
put his controversial writings in the very front rank of 
English prose, and make them, on the whole, a grander 
monument of his genius than all his verse. At least 
they are a monument more unique and distinct than 
any that he has built in verse ; while they are at once 
the complement and the commentary by which we 
read what is most characteristic in his poetry. 

It is not, however, as a man of letters that we 
are to regard him here, but as the interpreter to aU 
time of the profoundest conviction and passion of his 
age. Indeed, when we take together the heat, the 
glow, the splendor of diction, and the lyrical bursts of 

* Sterling's Essays. 



92 THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH. 

religious eloquence here and there, we have to go as 
far back as the Hebrew Prophets to find anything to 
compare fitly with these remarkable writings. 

The finest examples which best illustrate this last 
quality would require too much space to copy here. 
They are passages which Macaulay calls " a perfect 
field of cloth of gold. The style is stiff with gor- 
geous embroidery." In particular the prose Ode (as 
it has been called) in the form of prayer, which ends 
the first of his essays, " Of Eeformation in England," 
is perhaps the most extraordinary illustration to be 
found anywhere of poetic and religious genius in 
perfect blending, kindled to a white heat in the very 
stress of controversy by the ardor of a passionate de- 
votion to the interest at stake. 

A few sentences, however, it is necessary to give, 
to show how this interest was identified in Milton's 
mind with that idea of a Christian State which made 
the finest inspiration of Puritanism. He says, — 

" A Commonwealth ought to be but as one huge Chris- 
tian personage, one mighty growth and stature of an honest 
man, as big and compact in virtue as in body." 

And again, of the Puritan Colonies across the 
sea : — 

" What numbers of faithful and free-born Englishmen 
have been constrained to forsake their dearest home, their 
friends and kindred, whom nothing but the wide ocean 
and the savage deserts of America could hide and shelter 
from the fury of the bishops ! Oh, Sir, if we could but see 
the shape of our dear mother England, as poets are wont 
to give a personal form to what they please, how would 



MILTON'S POLITICAL WRITINGS. 93 

she appear, think ye, but in a mourning weed, with ashes 
on her head, and tears abundantly flowing from her eyes, 
to behold so many of her children exposed at once, and 
thrust from things of dearest necessity, because their con- 
science would not assent to things which the bishops 
thought indifferent 1 " 

Again he says, — 

" Let us not, for fear of a scarecrow, or else through 
hatred to be reformed, stand hankering and politizing, 
when God with spread hands testifies to us, and points us 
out the way to our peace." * 

The finest examples of Milton's political eloquence 
— one is tempted to say, the finest in any language — 
are naturally to be found in the Areopagitica, " a Speech 
for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing." A few words 
may be copied here, to show the splendid enthusiasm 
with which he contemplates his vision of an English 
Commonwealth : — 

" Lords and Commons of England ! Consider what a 
nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the gov- 
ernors, — a nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, in- 
genious, and piercing spirit ; acute to invent, subtle and 
sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point 
the highest that human capacity can soar to. . . . ]^ow 
once again, by all concurrence of signs, and by the general 
instinct of holy and devout men, as they daily and sol- 
emnly express their thoughts, God is decreeing to begin 
some new and great period in his Church, even to the 
reforming of Eeformation itself : what does he then but 
reveal himself to his servants, and as his manner is, fu'st 
to his Englishmen 1 " 

* Of Reformation in England, Part Second. 



94 THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH. 

"Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant 
nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and 
shaking her invincible locks. Methinks I see her like 
an Eagle muing her mighty youth, and kindling her 
undazzled eyes at the full midday beam, purging and 
unsealing her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of 
heavenly radiance ; while the whole noise of timorous and 
flocking birds, with those also that love the twihght, flut- 
ter about, amazed at what she means, and in their envious 
gabble would prognosticate a year of sects and schisms ! " 

It is not merely the splendid rhetoric which clothes 
in such figures the facts that looked quite otherwise to 
a profaiier eye ; but that these last words, especially, 
give a glimpse of the party passions and alarms that 
beset the revolutionary State, and in time brought 
the magnificent dream to nought. Within two years 
after this great defence of religious liberty, an angry 
Presbyterian speaks of toleration as " the grand design 
of the Devil, — his masterpiece and chief engine he 
works by at this time, to uphold his tottering king- 
dom." * In two years more, " Pride's purge " had 
cleared the Parliament of the Presbyterian party, with 
its helpless reactions and protests. The victorious In- 

* Thomas Edwards, hi his "Gangrsena" (1646), a long and very 
dull but curious and instructive tirade against the mischiefs of re- 
ligious Independency. One cannot quite spare this inside view of 
the sects and "sub-dichotomies of petty schisms" as Milton calls 
them, with which England was at this time afflicted. The lewd and 
hypocritical Koundhead in Scott's ' ' Woodstock " only hints the 
scandals told of these sectaries, especially the Anabaptists, who 
appear to have revived the primitive custom of naked baptism of 
adults. The most radical heresies of the nineteenth century ap- 
pear full-grown, rampant, and aggi'essive, as soon as the pressure 
of church authority is taken off. 



MILTON'S LAST APPEAL. 95 

dependents submitted their petty strifes and divisions 
to be controlled by the genius of Cromwell ; and for 
ten years more the Commonwealth became a Military 
Eepublic, strong, full-armed, and resolute, — a despotic 
Monarchy in everything but the name, but far enough 
from the Fifth Monarchy, for which the enthusiasts 
prayed and of which they dreamed. 

The tenacity and courage of Milton's republican 
faith are best seen in the last of his political tracts, 
published in 1660, in the very moment of the Ees- 
toration, on "the ready and easy way to establish 
a Free Commonwealth, and the excellence thereof, 
compared with the inconveniences and dangers of 
readmitting Kingship in this Nation," — " now that 
nothing remains," he thinks, "but in all reason the 
certain hopes of a speedy and immediate settlement 
forever in a firm and free Commonwealth." He will 
not doubt " but all ingenuous and knowing men will 
easily agree that a free Commonwealth — without 
single Person or House of Lords — is by far the best 
government, if it can be had," — the form of govern- 
ment, so far as we can make it out, being a Parliament 
of elective life-members in perpetual session ; in short, 
a Eevolutionary Convention like that of Prance in 
1793, without its revolutionary passion. Here are 
the closing sentences : — 

" What I have spoken is the language of that which is 
not called amiss The good old Cause. If it seem strange 
to any, it will not seem more strange, I hope, than con- 
viacing to backshders. Thus much I should perhaps have 
said, though I were sure I should have spoken only to 
trees and stones ; and had none to cry to but with the 



96 THE PURITAN COMMONWEALTH. 

Prophet, Earth, Earth, Earth ! to tell the very soil itself 
what its perverse inhabitants are deaf to. ISTay, though 
what I have spoke should happen — which Thou suffer 
not, who didst create man free ! nor Thou next, who didst 
redeem us from being servants of men ! — to be the last 
words of our expiring liberty. But I trust I shall have 
spoken persuasion to abundance of sensible and ingenuous 
men; to some, perhaps, whom God may raise to these 
stones to become children of reviving Liberty, — and may 
reclaim, though they seem now choosing them a captain 
back for Egypt, to bethink themselves a little, and con- 
sider whither they are rushing ; to exhort this torrent also 
of the people not to be so impetuous, but to keep their due 
channel ; and at length recovering and uniting their better 
resolutions, now that they see already how open and un- 
bounded the insolence and rage is of our common enemies, 
to stay these ruinous proceedings, justly and timely fearing 
to what a precipice of destruction the deluge of this epi- 
demic madness would hurry us, through the general de- 
fection of a misguided and abused multitude." 

It was a vain protest against the madness — as he 
deemed it — of the Eestoration. It was the more ex- 
asperating, as coming from one who had volunteered 
and gloried in the defence of regicide ; and we still 
find it strange that the dauntless republican reached, 
in his penury and blindness, a shelter from the re- 
actionary storm that now set in. 

The Presbyterians had invited, and still hoped to 
control, the Eestoration. But within two years more 
the Act of Uniformity destroyed in the English Church 
the last vestige of the work of tlie Puritans ; and a new 
Saint Bartholomew (Aug. 24, 1662) saw that great 
act of stanch and sober courage, the voluntary seces- 



THE NONCONFOEMISTS. 97 

sion of two thousand of the clergy.* The era of Puri- 
tanism was past ; and from this date the freedom of 
conscience which it sought is to be known under the 
title — not so heroic, perhaps, but not less honorable 
— of "Nonconformist." 

The loss was not all on the side of the Establish- 
ment, which had so cast off many of its bravest and 
truest children. The conception of the religious life 
itself which came to prevail in England was distinctly 
narrowed and lowered by the failure of that sublime 
dream of an ideal Commonwealth. The forms of re- 
ligion were left to the State Church ; the soul of piety 
was oftener found in what that Church excluded and 
disowned. English religious history is unique in hav- 
ing two parallel movements so clearly recognized, so 
distinct, and with so little tendency to run together, — 
one of secular indifference, one of a narrow pietism. 

How cynically worldly the Establishment had grown 
in the eighteenth century, is almost the only impres- 
sion of it left with us to-day.f On the other hand, 
the great work of Nonconformity has been among the 
lower Middle Class, to whom religion is a very serious 
thing, because it is the only outlook from the mo- 
notony of a hopelessly narrow and dreary life. To 

* The series of Acts by which Puritanism was driven from the 
English Church was the following : Act of Uniformity (1662) ; 
Conventicle Act (1664) ; Five-Mile Act (1665) ; Test and Corpora- 
tion Act (1673 : abolished 1718). 

t " Gentlemen," said Lord Thurlow to a Dissenting deputation, 
" I am for the Established Church : not that I care for one damned 
religion more than another, but because it is the Established Church ; 
and if you can get yoiir damned religion established, I will be for 
that too." 

7 



98 THE PURITAN COMMOXWEALTH. 

such as the inspired tinker Bimyan, for example, re- 
ligion is not merely creed and practice, — it is poetry, 
vision, hope ; it is all that life in those humble ways 
can know of poetry, vision, hope. For more than a 
century following the Restoration, Dissenters were 
practically disfranchised : no share in the gloiy or 
power of the public life of England could be theirs. 

So came first exclusion from secular and political 
affairs, then repugnance to them. On the one hand 
religion was the only thing to them worth thinking 
of or living for ; and so what was passionate and nar- 
row went straight to make that " other- worldliness " 
which Coleridge reproached as a bane of religious 
life in England, while a sincere but timid suspicion 
shrank from the most innocent of pleasures or any- 
thing like a sunny breadth of thought.* On the other 
hand, those natural and easy ways by which men 
broaden in their interests and sympathies, while the 
mind grows clear and vigorous in healthy action, — 
the cares of equal citizenship, and the opportunity 
of the higher education, — the Nonconformists were 
debarred from by the iniquity of laws they had no 
hand in making and no strength to break. The crude 
and barbarous theology of orthodox Dissent would 
never have been the religion of those good soids, but 
that they lived an unreal life, shut in by high walls 
from the large life of thought and action in the world 
outside. The life of humble piety they led showed 
often great courage and sincerity ; and the very force 
that compelled it into its narrow channel made of it 

* The writings of the Nonjuror William Law did most to create 
the peculiar tjiK of piety here spoken of. 



ENGLISH DISSENT. 99 

something as genuine and beautiful in its kind as 
anything that Christian history has to show, — some- 
thing of which we still have the echo in many an 
eighteenth-century hymn, and in the record of many 
a religious biography of that time. The two halves 
of that powerful and fervid national life are cut asun- 
der. That is why the saints and heroes of Dissent 
never appear in the pages of history, while domineer- 
ing prelates, with no heart of faith at all, give an evil 
eminence to the Church of that period. 

It has been the fashion of historians and critics to 
scorn the lack of ideality and heroism in the eigh- 
teenth century. But its best qualities do not stand 
out on the surface. What was heroic in its antece- 
dents had lost the battle. The flag of " the good old 
cause " was down. The dream of a Christian Com- 
monwealth had been roughly broken. The best life 
of England had been driven back into obscure by- 
ways. The age of Puritanism, which is the heroic 
age of Christian history, had passed away ; and such 
a City of God as men could still believe in was — 
what it had been to Saint Augustine at the fall of 
Rome — not the strength and splendor of an earthly 
State, but only the faint and far-off vision of one 
"eternal in the heavens." 



V. 

POET EOYAL. 

POET-ROYAL is the old name of a little valley 
about twenty miles to the west of Paris.* As 
early as 1204 it was made over to pious uses by a 
crusading baron, lord of the estate, or by his wife, and 
was long occupied by a convent of nuns of the order 
of St. Bernard. The religious house thus founded has 
linked the name of the little valley with a remarkable 
movement of thought in the Eoman Church, as well 
as with one of the most interesting chapters of mo- 
nastic life to be found in all Christian history.f 

In the year 1599 there was inducted as novice 
among the nuns of Port Eoyal a child eight years 
old, grave and precocious, second daughter of a cele- 

* The original name is said to be Porrois, and to signify, as near 
as may be, a bushy pond, or swamp. The easy transmutation of 
the word to Port-Royal is connected with a courtly but unlikely 
story of a visit paid to the spot by Philip Augustus, in 1214. 

t The admirable study of the whole subject by Sainte-Beuve (5 
vols., Hachette, Paris, 1860) is well known, as one of the most per- 
fect of special histories. A more condensed narrative, composed 
with excellent skill and knowledge of the ground, by Rev. Charles 
Beard ("Port Royal, a contribution to the History of Religious 
Literature in France," 2 vols., Longman, London), leaves nothing 
to be desired by the Englisli reader. An earlier narrative by Mrs. 
Schimmelpennink gives an interesting description of the recent ap- 
pearance of the valley. 



LA M]feEE ANG^LIQUE. 101 

brated advocate named Arnauld, and grandcliild of an 
equally celebrated advocate, Marion. In the view of 
both, father and grandfather, this was simply a con- 
venient way of providing for one of a family of chil- 
dren, which in course of years increased to twenty. 
To secure for the child the succession to the convent 
rule, they did not even scruple, a little later, to state 
her age as at least six years more than it was ; and 
further, to disguise her name by giving, instead, that 
which she had taken as a sister in the little commu- 
nity. This pious fraud had its effect, not only on the 
king's good-nature, but also upon the grave dignitaries 
of the Church. At the age of eleven, the child Jaque- 
line Arnauld, famous in religious history as La Mere 
Angelique, became Abbess, invested with full authori- 
ty over the twelve or fifteen young women who then 
constituted the religious house. Until her death in 
1661, at the age of seventy, the story of Port Eoyal is 
almost the personal biography of her who was during 
all that time its heart and soul. 

For the first few years, we may well suppose that it 
was something like playing at the austerities of con- 
vent life. Very quaint and pretty pictures have come 
down, to illustrate this period. A morning call of 
that gay and gallant king Henry IV., who knowing 
that her father was visiting there rode up, curious to 
see the pious flock under their child-shepherdess ; the 
little maid herself, in full ecclesiastical costume, and 
mounted on high pattens to disguise her youth, at 
the head of her procession to meet her royal visitor 
at the gate ; the kiss he threw over the garden-wall 
next day as he passed by on a hunt, with his compli- 



102 POET ROYAL. 

meuts to Madame la petite Ahhesse, — these are bright 
and innocent episodes in the stormy story of the 
time. 

But a great and sudden change came about a few 
years later. The young abbess, now nearly eighteen 
years of age, became converted to the most serious 
and rigid view of the duties of her calUng. Gently 
and kindly, but without an instant's wavering of pur- 
pose, inflexible to all temptation and entreaty, she re- 
solved to restore the primitive austerity of the rule 
of their pious founder Saint Bernard. For one thing, 
this rule demanded that the time of morning prayer 
should be carried back to two o'clock from the self- 
indulgent hour of four ; and, for another, that aU little 
personal treasures and belongings should be given up 
for that perfect religious poverty which is the ideal of 
monastic life. In this, the example of the girl-abbess, 
cheerful and resolute in choosing the hardest task 
always for herself, easily won the day. The crisis of 
the reform was when, with passionate grief, with tears 
and swooning, she steadily refused admittance to her 
own father and brother, hardening herself against their 
entreaties, anger, and reproach, and would only see 
them at the little grating that separated the life with- 
in from the life without. 

The true history of Port Royal dates from this 
crisis, "Wicket-Day," September 25, 1609. Just one 
hundred years and a few days later, early in October, 
1709, the malice of the Jesuit party, which for more 
than half that time had shown a strangely persistent 
and malignant hostility, had its way. The grounds 
were laid waste. The sacred buildings were destroyed. 



FORTUNES OF THE HOUSE. 103 

Even the graves were dug open, and the bodies that 
had been tenderly laid in them were cast out to be 
torn by dogs. All was done which insult and wanton 
desecration could do, to show that the heroic and 
eventful life of Port Eoyal was no more. 

So far, it is simply the fortunes of a Eeligious House, 
perhaps no more famous than many others, and not 
greatly different from them in the sort of story it has 
to tell. In this view, it is chiefly notable for being 
as it were a family history, connected at every point 
with the character and fortunes of a single household. 
Not less than twenty of the family of Arnauld — An- 
g^lique herself, her brothers and sisters, and children 
of a brother and sister — belonged to it, whether as 
simple nun, as official head, as lay-brother, champion, 
director, or adviser. Of these the most eminent in the 
lists of theology was " the great Arnauld," youngest 
child of the twenty, famous in controversy, indefa- 
tigably busy as a writer, scholar, logician, and polemic, 
stanch in persecution and in exile to the very close of 
his long life of eighty-two years (1612-1694). But 
there is hardly a day or an event in that story, for 
more than ninety of the hundred years, in which the 
most conspicuous name on the record is not that of 
a son or daughter of the family of Arnauld. 

A very characteristic feature in the history is the 
single-hearted fidelity and unwavering courage of the 
female members of this religious community, which 
quite surpasses, at one and another crisis, that of their 
chosen champions and advisers. At least, these re- 
ligious heroines would neither understand nor admit 
certain terms of compromise which theological sub- 



104 PORT ROYAL. 

tilty found it easy to prove and accept. The point at 
issue was not so much one of opinion as of conscience 
and honor ; and, to the amazement of friend and ene- 
my, a score of these gentle and timid women went 
without hesitation into prison or poverty for what in 
humility of spirit they made not the least pretension 
to understand ; or if they did waver, turned back with 
agonies of remorse to share the poverty or the prison 
of the rest. It came at length to be a mere question 
of fact, — whether five given propositions were con- 
tained in certain Latin folios they had never read and 
could not have understood ; but the Pope and the 
Jesuits had challenged the conscience of the little 
community, and to give way on one point was to be 
guilty of all. 

This unique fidelity on so fine-drawn a line of con- 
science has to do in part with the general discipline 
of Port Eoyal, and with simple loyalty to a Eeligious 
House. But, in particular, it was created by the sin- 
gular confidence and weight tlmt were given in that 
discipline to the counsels of the spiritual Director. 
The Confessional had been developed to a system in- 
conceivably vigilant and minute, touching every step 
of daily conduct. The skill trained under that sys- 
tem had become a science. It had its recognized 
adepts, masters, and professors, as weU known as those 
of any other art or mystery. No less than three,* each 
of whom may be called a man of genius in this voca- 
tion, are identified with the history of Port Eoyal. 
That passive heroism which is the great glory of these 
humble confessors is a quality most of all to be had 

* Saint-Cyran, Singliu, and De Saci. 



THE CONFESSIONAL. 105 

and strengthened in the air of the confessional. It 
goes naturally with the tender piety and the vow of 
implicit obedience, which make the atmosphere of 
monastic life. One of the saints of the period, a man 
of great emotional piety, of fertile and poetic fancy, 
charitable and tender-hearted to those who might be 
gained to the faith, and of pitiless rigor to those who 
would not,* — St. Francis de Sales, — had set that 
mark deep upon the mind of Angelique Arnauld, and 
through her it became a quality of the house. Noth- 
ing in the religious life, as we see it under such a 
discipline, is so foreign to our notion as the abject 
submission of a strong and superior mind to one in- 
ferior perhaps in every other quality except the genius 
and the tact of moral guidance. But nothing is so 
near the heart of that wonderful power held and ex- 
ercised by the Eoman priesthood.*!- 

A special circumstance brought this religious com- 
munity more conspicuously to the front in the history 

* As shown in the exile forced upon those who were not won hy 
his persuasions, who fled in the night across the Lake from his 
pai'ish of Annecy, in Switzerland. In 1599 "he got the Duke of 
Savoy to expel the Protestant ministers from several districts." He 
is said to have made 72,000 converts to the Eoman faith. 

t Here is the way it looks to the Catholic eye : "The Catholic 
religion does not oblige one to discover his sins indifferently to all 
the world. It suffers him to live concealed from all other men ; but 
it makes exception of one alone, to whom he is commanded to dis- 
close the depths of his heart, and to show himself as he is. It is 
only this one man in the world whom we are commanded to unde- 
ceive ; and he must keep it an inviolable secret, so that this knowl- 
edge exists in him as if it were not there. Can anything be desii-ed 
more charitable and gentle ? Yet the corruption of man is such, 
that he finds hardship in this command." — Pascal: Thoughts, 
oh. iii. IF 8. 



106 PORT ROYAL. 

of the time than its humble locality might promise. 
As the fame of its discipline spread, its numbers 
grew. The narrow cells were crowded, and the un- 
wholesome damps bred fever. These pious recluses 
were content to accept sickness and death for their 
appointed discipline. But the better sense prevailed, 
and an estate in the edge of Paris was bought, built 
on, and occupied. The most critical events in the 
story, accordingly, have their place, not in the rude 
valley, but in the tumultuous capital. There are 
two Port Eoyals, one " in Paris," one " in the Fields ; " 
and the scene keeps shifting from one location to 
the other. 

Then, too, it was Paris of the Regency and of the 
Fronde, where some of the most critical years were 
passed. This brought the Eeligious House upon the 
scene of sharp conflicts in Church and State, and so 
exposed it to dangers which in time grew threatening. 
Some of the famous women of the day, Avho had been 
pets of society, or had been deep in political intrigue, 
found shelter and comfort among the nuns of Port 
Eoyal, — notably the famous and too charming 
Madame de Longueville, sister of the great Conde, — 
drawn, perhaps, by ties of old friendship, or reminis- 
cence of early pious longings, or that recoil of feeling 
deepening to remorse when a course of vanity and am- 
bition has been run through. Such guests might easily 
bring upon the most devout of monastic retreats a 
perilous suspicion of disloyalty to the Court. 

These are the points of interest we find in the 
annals of Port Eoyal simply as a monastic institu- 
tion, as a group of persons bound by general sympa- 



THE JANSENIST CONTKOVEESY. 107 

thy in religious views. These alone make it a unic[ue 
subject of religious biography. But these alone are 
not what make its real importance in Christian his- 
tory. The hundred years covered by the life of this 
community are the chronological frame which incloses 
a very remarkable phase in the development of mod- 
ern Eomanism. The controversy on the doctrine of 
Grace, brought so sharply to the front in the conflicts 
of the Eeformation ; the long and bitter warfare of 
Jesuit and Jansenist ; vivacious and eager debate on 
the ground and form taken in the intricate science 
of Casuistry ; acrimonious discussion as to the exact 
meaning and import of Papal Infallibility, — these, 
no less than the heroic and indomitable temper ex- 
hibited by a group of pious recluses in defence of 
what was to them a point of conscience as well as a 
point of faith, are what give the story its significance 
to us. 

Port Eoyal was the centre and soul of what is 
known as the Jansenist controversy. Jansenism was 
the last great revolt or protest against official domi- 
nation, within the lines of the Eoman Church ; and 
it was effectually suppressed. The story of its sup- 
pression is the most striking illustration we find any- 
where of that unyielding hardihood in the assertion 
of authority, which that Church has deliberately 
adopted for its policy; of that unrelenting central- 
ism, which does not stick at any inhumanity or any 
sacrifice, to secure the servile perfection of ecclesias- 
tical discipline. The best intelligence and the truest 
conscience of the time were clearly on the side of the 
Jansenist protest ; but such reasons weighed not one 



liJH POET ROYAL. 

grain against the hard determination of Toj)e, Jesuit 
and King to crush, in the most devout and loyal sub- 
jects of the Church, the meekest and humblest asser- 
tion of mental liberty. 

For the origin of this controversy we must go back 
a little way, to the earlier polemics of the Eeforma- 
tion. The doctrine of Divine Decrees had come, as 
we have seen, to be not only a main point in the 
creed of Calvin, but a test of fidelity in the Protestant 
faith. Its strong point, morally, was in setting a di- 
rect and explicit command of God to the conscience 
over against the arbitrary and minute directions of 
the Church, which were sure to run out into a quib- 
bling casuistry. Its weak point was that it declared, 
or seemed to declare, a downright religious Fatalism. 
The Church, on the other hand, in demanding obedi- 
ence to its rule, must allow something for the liberty 
of the subject to obey or disobey ; while the doctrine 
of moral freedom known as Pelagian, or even the semi- 
Pelagian compromise of it, had always been stigma- 
tized as heresy. Here was a fair and open field for 
never-ending controversy. 

A topic so inviting to scholastic subtilty and po- 
lemic ardor could not be neglected by the Jesuits. 
They became eager champions of free-wilh Their 
skill in the confessional had made them masters of 
the art of casuistry. The whole drift of their method 
was to make religion a matter of sentiment and blind 
obedience, rather than of conscience and interior con- 
viction. The Pelagian heresy they must at the same 
time repudiate, in terms at least ; and it was a party 
triumph when the Spaniard Molina, an eminent 



JANSEN AND ST. CYKAN. 109 

doctor of their Order, published, in 1588, a treatise to 
reconcile the sovereignty and foreknowledge of God 
with the moral liberty of man. The key- word of his 
argument we shall express accurately enough by the 
phrase contingent decrees. Our acts themselves are 
not in fact predetermined, though the Divine fore- 
knowledge of them is infallible. This fine point was 
seized as a real key to the position. The name " Mo- 
linist " is used to define a system of thinking which 
holds that " the grace of God which giveth salvation " 
is not sufficient of itself, but requires, to make it effi- 
cient, the co-operation of the human will. And this 
may be understood to be the position of the Jesuits 
in the debate that followed. 

But an uneasy sense was left, in many pious minds, 
that this was not the genuine doctrine of the Church. 
In particular, two young students of theology at Lou- 
vain were drawn, about the year 1604, into deep dis-. 
cussion of the point at issue. These were Saint-Cyran, 
afterwards confessor of Port Eoyal, and Cornelius Jan- 
sen, a native of Holland. They were well agreed that 
the point must be met by the study of Saint Augustine ; 
and the one task of their lives — particularly of Jan- 
sen, till his death in 1638 — was little else than the 
exploring and the expounding of this single authority. 
Jansen is said to have studied all the Avritings of 
Augustine through ten times, and all those pertaining 
to the Pelagian controversy thirty times. 

The strict Augustinian doctrine of the Divine De- 
crees thus became the firm conviction of these two 
friends, and through them the profession of Port Eoyal. 
It differs barely by a hair's-breadth — if indeed any 



110 POET EOYAL. 

difference can be found — from the Calvinistic dogma. 
Jansenism is accordingly often called Calvinism, or 
Protestantism, witliin the Church of Eome. Profess- 
ing to be the most loyal and sincere of Catholics, the 
Port-Eoyalists of course denied the charge. The dis- 
tinction they made was this : * The Fatalistic doctrine, 
or Calvinism, asserts that there is no such thing as 
moral liberty at all. The Pelagian doctrine, or Mo- 
linism, holds that man's natural freedom suffices to 
take the first essential step to his own salvation. 
The true Augustinian doctrine is that man's freedom 
is (so to speak) dormant and impotent, till it has been 
evoked by Divine " prevenient " grace ; then, and not 
till then, it is competent to act. In short, in the most 
literal sense, " it is God that worketh in us both to 
will and to do." -f- 

This thin line of opinion, stretched along the sharp 
boundary between two gulfs of error, made (as it were) 
the conducting wire which attracted the sharp light- 
ning of Jesuit intolerance, so as to strike, and at length 
to shatter, the institution of Port Eoyal. 

The controversy broke out upon the publication, in 
1640, of the heavy folios in which Jansen had summed 
up the labor of his life ; and these folios were searched 
with jealous eyes, till five propositions were found in 
them, or were said to be found in them, on which a 
charge of heresy could be laid. Only two are ini- 

* See "The Provincial Letters," Letter xviii. 

t One of the anecdotes of the time when Port Pv03-al was under 
the darkest cloud is that a Jesuit prelate, happening to come into 
church when this text was being read, at once silenced the iitterance 
of the flagrant Jausenist heresy ! 



THE FIVE PROPOSITIONS. Ill 

portant enough, or clear enough of technicality, to 
occupy us here. They are these : (1) That there are 
duties required of man which he is naturally unable 
to perform ; (2) That Christ died, not for all mankind, 
but only for the elect. 

In the course of the debate these "Five Propo- 
sitions " became very famous. Whether they did or 
did not exist in Jansen's folios was the point on which, 
as we have seen, the faithful women of Port Eoyal 
staked their loyalty and underwent their martyrdom. 
The Pope's bull, condemning the volumes, asserted 
that the heresies were there. As good Catholics, the 
Port-Eoyalists condemned the propositions ; but as 
loyal members of the community they declared that 
they were not there. The Pope, they said, was doubt- 
less infallible on a point of faith, but not on a point 
of fact.* To this it was replied, that religious faith 
was demanded for the one, only ecclesiastical or hu- 
man faith for the other. 

On such poor quibbles as these all that long story 
of persecution turns. It was, to be sure, the prover- 
bial rancor of theological hate that made the attack 
so bitter. But what made it effectual and deadly was 
that a Jesuit confessor held the conscience (such as it 
was) of the young king ; and that a vague dread of 
disloyalty, with memories of the time when he and 
his mother were barred out of Paris by the Fronde, 
made the point a test not only of religious but of po- 
litical soundness in the faith. 

It would be a weary and needless task to trace the 
changes of fortune that befell the little community 
* The distinction, famous in those days, oifait and droit. 



112 PORT ROYAL. 

during those fifty evil years. Our concern is only 
with the movement of thought in which those for- 
tunes were involved. A group of very cultivated, 
able, and devoted men had gathered in close relations 
with the Religious House. They included brothers, 
nephews, friends of the women who had assumed its 
vows, as well as their clerical advisers. They had 
founded a famous School at Port Eoyal in the Fields, 
and made the estate beautiful and productive by the 
labor of their hands. We find among them, as pupils 
or associates, several of the eminent men of letters, — 
including Eacine, Boileau, and La Fontaine, — who re- 
flected back upon the religious community something 
of the lustre of that famous and brilliant age. 

Bright on the list is the illustrious name of Blaise 
Pascal, certainly the most vigorous and original genius 
of the day. At twelve, he was feeling his own way, 
in his play-hours, in the forbidden field of mathemat- 
ics, — forbidden because his father wished first to make 
him master his Latin and Greek ; and when detected 
he was trying to prove to himself what he seems to 
have divined already, that the three angles of a tri- 
angle make just two right angles. At eighteen, to 
save his father labor in accounts, he devised and with 
infinite pains — making with his own hands something 
like fifty models — constructed a calculating machine, 
which was held a miracle of ingenuity, as if he had 
put mind into brass wheels and steel rods, and actu- 
ally taught machinery to think.* At twenty-four he 

* This notion (if it were really held) was a logical enough result 
from the Cartesian dogma which then prevailed, that animals were 
mere machines. ' ' There was hardly a solitary [at Port Royal] who 



PASCAL. 113 

was in advance of all the natural philosophers of the 
day, including Descartes, then in the height of his 
fame, in devising the true test of Torricelli's theory 
of the weight of the atmosphere, in the famous ex- 
periment of the Puy de Ddme, a high hill in his na- 
tive Auvergne : the mercury, which stood at some- 
thing over twenty-six (French) inches at the foot of 
the hill, showed less than twenty-four inches at its 
summit. Later in life, he relieved the distresses of 
an agonizing disease by working out the true theory 
of the Cycloid, and challenging the mathematicians 
of the day to a solution of its problems. 

These feats of a singularly sagacious and pene- 
trating intellect interest us as showing the high-water 
mark of the science of the day ; but still more, in this 
particular connection, as a contrast or relief to the 
share which Pascal had in the religious life of Port 
Eoyal, and to the unique place he holds as a religious 
thinker. 

He was by nature seriously inclined. His health 
broke down early under the strain of study and dis- 
cipline, and for more than half his life he was a 
nervous dyspeptic and a paralytic. " From his eigh- 

did not talk of automata. To beat a dog was no longer a matter of 
any consequence. The stick was laid on with the utmost indiffer- 
ence, and those who pitied the animals, as if they had any feeling, 
were laughed at. They said they were only clockAvork, and the 
cries they uttered when they were beaten were no more than the 
noise of some little spring that had been moved : all this involved 
no sensation. They nailed the poor creatures to boards by the four 
paws to dissect them while still alive, in order to watch the circula- 
tion of the blood, which was a great subject of discussion." — Fon- 
taine's lfe»ioM-es (Cologne, 1738), ii. 52. These delightful Memoirs, 
more than anything else, bring us near to the heart of Port Eoyal. 



114 PORT ROYAL. 

teeiith year to the hour of his death, he never passed 
a day without pain." He had partly recovered under 
a change of habit, and seems to have enjoyed the 
gay life of Paris, even with a touch of extravagance ; 
for he chanced one day to be driving a carriage with 
six horses, when the leaders plunged over an unrailed 
bridge into the river Seine, and only the breaking of 
reins and traces saved him from being drowned. He 
appears never to have recovered from the shock of this 
accident ; and the tradition afterwards current was 
that he always saw a chasm close at his left hand, 
and could not sit easy in his seat, unless a chair or a 
screen were set beside him. 

The impression went deep and strong, naturally 
enough, in the way of a profound piety and contrition. 
A younger sister was already one of the religious com- 
munity of Port Eoyal. He himself, at twenty-four, 
in a time of religious revival, had come under the 
powerful influence of the confessor Saint-Cyran. At 
thirty-one, in the autumn of 1654, after experiencing 
all the intensity of that spiritual crisis which is termed 
" conversion," he devoted his life, with absolute fervor 
of conviction, to the tasks and disciplines of piety. 
This rare mind, prematurely great and prematurely 
lost, — for Pascal died at the age of thirty-nine, worn 
out with cruel austerities * and long disease, — is the 

* As if all the rest were not enough, his sister Jagqueline relates 
that he wore an iron girdle next his skin, armed with sharp points, 
which he would drive into his flesh with his elbow, if he ever de- 
tected in himself any thought of vanity. In short, he as eagerly 
courted pain for its own sake as the Eastern saints and anchorites 
had done in their fanatical austerities. See " Early Christianity," 
pp. 173-178. 



MIRACLE OF THE HOLY THOEK 115 

radiant centre in that circle of genius, of profound 
and devout thought, which makes the intellectual 
gloty of Port Eoyal. 

The story of this reKgious crisis would not be quite 
complete, without some mention of the "miracle of 
the Holy Thorn," which took place in the spring of 
1656. A fragment of the Crown of Thorns had come 
into the possession of a pious enthusiast, who could 
not rest content without passing it about through 
several Eeligious Houses, to receive their veneration 
as an inestimable relic. A little niece of Pascal, 
pupil at Port Eoyal, was suffering with a painful 
swelling of the eyelid, which seemed incurable ; but 
when touched by the holy thorn it presently dis- 
charged, and " the cliild was healed in the seK-same 
hour." Pascal made no doubt that the miracle was 
real. The mocking sarcasms of the enemies of the 
House only rendered the belief in it more fixed and 
dear. It was the beginning of what grew into a long 
series of extravagances and scandals, which disfigure 
the later history of Jansenism down to its dregs in 
the days of the Convulsionnaires. But now the faith 
was natural, genuine, and sincere ; and it marks the 
starting-point of that remarkable volume of Fragments 
which we know as " Pascal's Thoughts." * 

A full descriptive title of Pascal's Thoughts would 

* In tlie earlier editions of the "Thoughts," very much was 
altered, suppressed, transposed, or added from other sources. A 
convenient summary of the literary history may be found in the 
variorum edition of Louandre (Charpentier, Paris, 1854). A com- 
parison of texts is absolutely necessary, to see how the precision and 
vivacity of Pascal's style have often been smoothed into vague com- 
monplace by the early editors. 



116 PORT ROYAL. 

be " Hints and Fragments of an Essay in Defence of 
the Christian Eeligion." Some of the " hints " are 
expanded into chapters, or brief essays ; and some 
of the "fragments" consist of broken phrases, or 
even single words, written almost illegibly as loose 
memoranda, and faithfully preserved as they were left 
by the writer at his death. When the " Thoughts " 
were first published, some of the keener points were 
trimmed away, so as not to disturb the "religious 
peace " by thorning the Jesuit sensibilities ; many of 
the fragments were omitted, and the whole was made 
over into an artificial order. Even this smooth ma- 
nipulation, however, did not disguise the vivacity, the 
emphasis, the shrewdness and point of these famous 
paragraphs, which have kept, in the line of theology, 
a repute something like that in social life of the con- 
temporary " Maxims " of La Eochefoucauld. With 
equal vigor, they often have almost equal acridity 
and sharpness. 

This quality comes from what might almost be 
called the key-note of the Essay, — an incessant 
brooding on the paradoxes of human nature. Whole 
pages may be described as an expansion of those 
vigorous lines in Young's " Night Thoughts " : — 

" How poor, how rich — how abject, how august — 
How complicate, how wonderful is Man ! " 

Pascal puts this paradox in the figure of a self-con- 
scious and sentient Eeed, — a figure which, by much 
revision, he has brought at length into this shape: 

" Man is but a reed, the frailest thing in nature, — but 
a reed that thinks. To crush him, does not need the 



pascal's "thoughts." 117 

weapons of all the universe : a breath, a drop of water, 
is enough. But though the universe should crush him, 
yet man would still be nobler than his destroyer ; for he 
knows that he is mortal, while the universe knows nothing 
of its own dominion over him" (chap. ii. ^10). 

Another aspect of the paradox is given, pungently 
enough, in this very subtile justification of the con- 
ditions of civil government : — 

" Summum jus, summa injuria. The rule (voie) of the 
majority is best, because we can see what it is, and be- 
cause it has the power to make itself obeyed ; stiU it is 
the rule of the incompetent. If it had been possible, force 
would have been put into the hands of Justice. But force 
is a material quality, and will not let itself be handled 
according to our will ; while justice is a mental quality, 
directed by our choice. Hence, justice has been com- 
mitted to the hands of Force ; and what we must obey, 
that we call right. Herein is found the right of the 
sword : which is, indeed, a genuine right, since without 
it violence would be on one side, and justice on the other " 
(chap. vii. IT 8). 

One other example of this epigrammatic turn : 

" One who would clearly perceive the nothingness of 
man, has only to consider the causes and effects of Love. 
The cause is a trifle (je-ne-sais-qiioi) ; the effects are fright- 
ful. That trifle, so slight a thing that you cannot trace it, 
stirs up all the earth, — princes, armies, the world itself. 
If Cleopatra's nose had been a little shorter, the whole 
face of the earth would have been different " (chap. viii. 
^29). 

That there is something cynic and saturnine in this 
contemptuous wit there is no denying. But there is 



118 PORT ROYAL. 

nothing in the character of the Essay, taken broadly, 
to show Pascal as a sceptic in matters of faith, as is 
sometimes said, or to hint that his austerities were a 
sort of penance, to exorcise the spirit of unbelief. 
Not only a considerable part of the " Thoughts " are 
a defence of Christianity on the familiar ground of 
the modern Apologists, — the argument from history, 
prophecy, and miracle, — but in all this portion the 
tone has absolutely the calm and contented assurance 
of a pious believer. The very simplicity with which 
the argument is put, free from all suspicion of the 
flaws a later time has found in it, is token of a faith 
that — in this direction at least — has not yet learned 
to question. 

We should probably state the case more fairly 
thus. The mind of Pascal had been brought to feel 
with singular keenness the contrast (which, as we 
have seen, never occurred to the Mediaeval mind) 
between the two forms of assurance which we call 
Knowledge and Faith ; one resting on outward evi- 
dence, the other on interior conviction. In Geometry 
he followed precisely, even as a child, the line of pure 
mathematical demonstration. In Physics he demand- 
ed and devised the most accurate processes of experi- 
ment, to prove the theory which he already held as a 
truth of reason. It is a waymark of the advance we 
have made in the development of religious thought, 
that just here, in the keenest and most reflective in- 
tellect of the time, the contrast of tl>e two methods, 
scientific and intuitive, had come sharply and clearly 
into consciousness. Pascal was in the very front rank 
of the scientific advance of his a<'e, — an age of widen- 



pascal's scepticism : SCIENCE AND FAITH. 119 

ing discovery and exact observation. But there is no 
reason to think that religious belief was not just as 
real and true to him as any demonstrations of natural 
science. The whole method of the life he had adopt- 
ed, the experiments in living which he saw constantly 
close about him, made that life as real, and the foun- 
dation it rested on as sure, as anything that could 
possibly be proved in the way of geometry or physics. 
In truth, was not that realm of faith, for which those 
humble devotees were so loyal to live and die, at least 
as real a thing as that celestial realm which Galileo 
saw afar off, " through a glass darkly " ? 

In fact, Pascal seems to have held natural science 
very cheap. It was far, in that age, from having 
reached the point where it begins to furnish a ser- 
viceable rule of conduct. Its widening fields of dis- 
covery served for little more than mental expansion 
and delight. To such a mind as his the system of 
Copernicus and Galileo was simply a wider void, over 
against the intense reality he was conscious of in the 
world of emotion, belief, and hope. " Nature," he said, 
" confounds the sceptic, and reason confounds the dog- 
matist." But neither nature nor reason could anni- 
hilate that realm of interior reality in which he lived. 
ISTay, the very confusion of doubt and dogma only 
made this reality more apparent. 

Accordingly, we find that it was not the contrast* 
of the outward and inward world — so clear to us as 
we look back upon the mental conditions of his day 
— which really impressed his mind. It was rather 
the moral contrast between two methods, both purely 
intellectual. This contrast he discusses, with genu- 



120 PORT ROYAL. 

ine interest, under the names of Epictetus and Mon- 
taigne. The Stoic method he admires, but condemns 
because it leads to pride. The Sceptic or Epicurean 
method he hates, because it leads to contempt. " Epic- 
tetus is very harmful to those who are not deeply 
persuaded of the corruption of all human virtue which 
is not of faith ; Montaigne is deadly to those who 
have any leaning to impiety and vice." How far 
Science is from giving him any light, he shows in 
the following words : — 

" I had spent much time in the study of abstract sci- 
ences, and was weary of the solitude which I found in it. 
When I began the study of man, I saw that those abstract 
sciences do not meet his case ; that I was more astray in 
exploring them than others were in ignorance of them ; 
and so I pardoned their imperfect knowledge. But I 
thought at least to find many associates in the study of 
man, and that this is the proper study for human crea- 
tures. I was deceived. There are still fewer who study 
man than geometry. It is because we do not know how 
to study ourselves, that we search out other things. But, 
after all, even this is not the knowledge which man needs ; 
and, for his own welfare, he had best remain in ignorance 
of it" (chap. viii. IT 11). 

All this shows, to be sure, a fundamental scepticism 
as to the grounds of intellectual belief, so far as they 
can be determined by the study of nature, even of 
human nature. Such study, it asserts, can but mock 
the soul with stones instead of bread. But it does 
not indicate that Pascal ever wavered in the least as 
to the grounds of religious verity. 

The fame of Pascal as a writer rests not so much 



THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS. 121 

on the " Thoughts," which are broken and incomplete, 
but on the " Provincial Letters," which, for both style 
and argument, are reckoned among the most perfect 
of literary compositions. They are claimed in fact to 
have created, as it were, by one master stroke, that 
clear, graceful, piquant, and brilliant prose style which 
is the particular boast of the charming language in 
which he wrote. 

These Letters give us, so to speak, the interior his- 
tory of the conflict of Port Eoyal against the Jesuits. 
That is, without telling any of the incidents, they give 
the line of debate on morals and dogma which shows 
the course and spirit of that controversy. To the 
charges of the Jesuits a labored reply had been made 
by Arnauld, which fell quite flat and dead when he 
read it by way of trial to his colleagues. Pascal saw 
the point, and was persuaded to try his hand. And 
so came, at due intervals, this series of inimitable 
" Letters addressed to a Provincial," — probably the 
most perfect example of grave, sustained, and pungent 
irony in all literature. 

Specimens would not serve to show their quality, 
as in the case of the " Thoughts." The impression, 
like the expression of a face, must be caught, if not 
by studying, at least by glancing at, the whole. A 
large part is taken up with those details of casuistry 
which have given an evil odor to the very name of 
what is really nothing but a study of "cases in 
morals," — as if it meant apologies for what is im- 
moral, — and have added the word "Jesuitry" to the 
world's vocabulary of contempt. And these are given 
in the blandest of dialogue between the modest in- 



122 POET ROYAL. 

quirer on the one part, who represents the author, 
and the Jesuit Father on the other part, who brings 
out, with a droll complacency, all the ingenious apolo- 
gies for usury, perjury, theft, and murder, to be found 
in those famous casuists, Molina, Sanchez, and Esco- 
bar. Another large part is taken up with those fine- 
drawn distinctions of philosophic dogma which define 
the true faith between the Calvinist peril on the right 
hand and the Molinist on the left. These have been 
sufficiently indicated in the story of the Jesuit assault 
and the Jansenist controversy. 

Now that the glow of controversy has gone out of 
these Letters, they in their turn have grown tame and 
dull. It is as impossible to recall the helpless and 
smarting wrath that chafed under the keen whiplash 
of moral satire, as it is to revive the polemic interest 
of the debate on " sufficient " and *' efficient " grace, or 
the true meaning of the phrase " proximate power," or 
on the question — which Eichelieu himself had in an 
evil hour turned aside to argue — whether "attrition" 
without " contrition " entitles the penitent to absolu- 
tion. The interior conflicts of the Eoman Catholic 
theology two hundred years ago have small interest 
for us now. 

But there is another aspect of the case, which has 
a very vital meaning to our history, take a view of it 
as surface-broad as we will. The century which em- 
braces the heroic and tragic story of Port Eoyal is 
also the century of splendor to the French Monarchy ; 
of chief pride and strength to the Galilean Church, 
which sunned itself in the rays of that glittering orb. 
When our story begins, Henry IV. is concerting an 



THE GALLICAN CHUKCH. 123 

armed league of European powers, by which he means 
to break the strength of Spain and compel a religious 
peace. The next year (1610) he is stabbed to death 
by a Jesuit assassin, and the way is open that leads 
into the horror of the Thirty Years' War beyond the 
border, and on the hither side to the long tragedy of 
the extermination of Protestantism and the crushing 
of all free thought in France. 

It is the age of the great Court Preachers. Bossuet 
and Bourdaloue died five years before, and Fenelon six 
years after, the final desolation of Port Eoyal. The 
Eevocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) — which 
exiled half a million of Protestants,* hunted out by 
the terrors of search-warrant and dragonnade ; which 
carried misery and dread unspeakable among a whole 
population, pious, thriving, and pathetically loyal — 
took place during the height of the Jesuit persecution 
of Port Eoyal, while "the great Arnauld" was in 
hiding or in exile. To make the tragedy more som- 
bre, these horrors were approved, if not incited, not 
only by those great prelates, but by the bold contro- 
versialist Arnauld himself, who was the victim of their 
hostility. 

Still to enhance the irony of the situation, the 
same alliance of Court and Jesuit, which persecuted 
the women of Port Eoyal for not consenting to the 
Pope's infallibility in matters of fact as well as in 
matters of faith, had nearly, by a new revolt against 
the Pope's authority, made the Church of France in- 
dependent of the Church of Eome. It was heresy 
not to sign the " Formulary," in which Jansen's five 

* The number is variously stated at from 300,000 to 800,000. 



124 POET ROYAL. 

propositions were condemned by Alexander VII. ; it 
was disloyalty not to uphold tlie King in the Four 
Articles * of the " Declaration," which had been con- 
demned and annulled by Alexander VIII. Nothing 
is wanting to proclaim the absolute divorce of ecclesi- 
asticism at that day from humanity and from faith. 

To make the evidence of that divorce complete 
needed only the tragic and pitiful story of the latter 
days of Port Eoyal. It is but from a long distance, 
and very imperfectly at that, that we can know how 
the cruelty struck into those patient hearts. It was 
ingeniouslyaimed just where their tenderest sensibility 
would feel it most. To be debarred for years from 
that "Frequent Communion" which was both the 
joy and the most sacred duty of their lives ; to have 
the Sacraments withheld through suffering months of 
sickness, because they would not sign with the hand 
what was a lie to the heart ; to come to the hour of 
death, and stiU submit to the cold refusal of the words 
which to them were pass-words and the comforting 
assurance of eternal blessedness, — aU this was realit}'- 
to them, in a sense we can hardly understand. It is 
quaintly touching to hear, too, how they flocked " as 
doves to their windows" near the convent waU, in 
midwinter nights, to listen to the voice of their Con- 
fessor as he preached to them, perched in a tree out- 
side, — and that by stealth, and as it were in flight, 
for fear of the implacable pursuer. Scenes of this 
sort show us, indeed, that the faith of that day was 
not dead. But they seem to show that, when we 

* Constituting the so-called " Gallicau Liberties." See below, 
under the title " Infidelity in France." 



THE GREAT FRENCH PREACHERS. 125 

would find it, we must look for it quite outside that 
circle illuminated by the burning and shining lights 
of the official faith. 

This inference would not be quite true. We know 
that Bossuet was an able and, in his way, an estimable 
champion of the Church he believed in. We can read 
for ourselves the words of Bourdaloue, which come 
home genuine and straight to our own conscience. 
We know that F^nelon was an angel of charity in the 
diocese to which he had been exiled from the Court. 
But we know, too, that the Church which these men 
served had lost " that most excellent gift of charity ; " 
and, even while they served, it was treasuring wrath 
against the coming day of wrath, which overtook it in 
the Eevolution. 



VI. 

PASSAGE FEOM DOGMA TO PUEE EEASOK 

A FADING interest in theological speculation, 
which the fourteenth century had cast into the 
chill of a certain intellectual despair, was suddenly 
roused to a fervent heat in the flame of the great Eefor- 
mation. There followed a period of polemics, — active, 
virulent, and voluminous. Nothing would content 
the mind now but absolute certainty upon the most 
unsearchable of problems. Predestination, election, 
grace, the terras of escape from the sharpest of tor- 
ments in this life, or torments infinite in the life to 
come, — matters remote from all possibility of human 
knowledge, — made the most familiar and the most 
practical questions of debate, and continued so for 
sometliing more than a century. 

A single glance upon this hundred years of contro- 
versy is all that we can spare. On the Catholic side, 
speculative differences are hushed, for the present, in 
the stress of the battle that has to be fought against 
the Eeformers ; and, under the authority of the great 
Council, we find at least a nominal harmony and con- 
sent. On the other side, no sooner is the Catholic 
unity once broken, than opinion runs out into the 
hundred or more " variations " which the student must 
take note of, and which the loyal Catholic finds the 
easiest object of his attack. Speaking broadly, we 



THE BIBLE. 127 

may say that the Eoman Church had the larger phi- 
losophy of life, while the Protestant had the deeper 
and intenser conviction of the higher law of life. JSTow 
it was this conviction which made both the motive 
and the strength of Protestant dogmatism ; and so we 
have to follow out the movement of thought we are 
attempting to trace, chiefly in the debates on the 
Protestant side. 

Again, all parties are agreed, at starting, in taking 
the Scriptures as final authority on all matters of spec- 
ulative belief. This is just as true of the Council of 
Trent, which assumes as the standard of Catholic 
verity the Vulgate Bible under official interpretation, 
as it is of Luther's demand to be tried by " the word 
of holy Scripture," or the arguments of Socinus against 
the pure humanism of Francis David in Eastern Hun- 
gary, or Chillingworth's assertion that " the Bible, and 
the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants." The 
point of difference is not that Protestantism has a dif- 
ferent standard of ultimate appeal. But Protestantism 
allows in theory the right of private judgment, with- 
out the steadying pressure of a recognized tribunal by 
which that judgment shall be guided. It was no doubt 
illogical for Protestants to persecute dissenters, like 
their opponents : the death of Servetus was a shock to 
their principle as well as to their humanity ; and, in 
fact, except where political dangers made the motive or 
pretext (as under Elizabeth), religious persecution was 
extremely rare on the Protestant side, contrasting at 
infinite distance with the systematic policy of torture 
and suppression which the Catholic theory demanded. 
Still, neither side was clear of the erroneous assump- 



128 PASSAGE FROM DOGMA TO PURE REASON. 

tion that the soul's destiny is staked on riglitness of 
opinion ; or could be, until the passage from dogma to 
philosophy had been fairly made, and opinion was left 
to be shaped by the free intelligence of mankind. 

The change implied in these words is far more radi- 
cal and fundamental than most theologians have been 
willing to admit. Indeed, it is only of late years that 
one comes to see how radical and fundamental it is. 
The difference as to the standard of authority, or the 
terms of salvation, is as notliing beside the fundamen- 
tal postulate in which both parties were agreed. No 
controversy had risen, as yet, of natural and super- 
natural. No doubt was felt as to the objective exist- 
ence of that celestial realm, with its shining courts, 
and its legions of ministering spirits about the throne, 
which to the modern mind is the region of pure poetry 
or religious metaphor ; no doubt as to the real agency 
of angels and devils in the daily business of men's 
lives ; no doubt as to the fiery horrors of the world 
below, which must prove the doom of the great ma- 
jority of the human race. AU these, to the Christian 
mind, had their distinct local habitation. The new 
cosmology of Copernicus, indeed, threatened to invade 
that realm ; but this heresy in science Melanchthon 
thought should be suppressed forcibly by the State, 
like any other heresy. 

So too the conception held of revelation. It followed 
that religious doctrine — the " inspired Word " — was 
thought to be definitely a communication from that 
outside world to this, — as definitely as the orders 
sent by special messenger, or the bulletin forwarded 
by telegraph, from a commanding officer to the forces 



EEVELATION. 129 

under his command. Absolutely, the only business 
of those who receive them is to understand them in 
their exact import, and obey them on the peril of 
their lives. Any hint that they come within the 
range of free opinion, or make part of the common 
body of human thought, to be interpreted by the com- 
mon maxims of criticism, is "heresy" — that is, 
" free-thinking " — necessarily and at once. 

Thus it is the characteristic of this stage of religious 
opinion that there can be strictly no modification and 
no compromise. Opinion is a test of loyalty. Only 
one mode, one shade of opinion, can insure acceptance. 
And, in the heroic temper so engendered, there is no 
hair's-breadth of variation for which men would not 
be, and have not been, as free, nay, eager, to go to mar- 
tyrdom or exile as any soldier whose valor is appealed 
to, to man the forlorn hope in battle or siege. 

This, I say, follows from the conception of a revela- 
tion as accepted in the mind of that time. It is need- 
less to disguise the gravity of the change that has 
come about. I will not say simply among those whose 
method of religious thinking is frankly naturalistic, 
who knowingly accept and consistently abide by the 
maxims and canons of natural science. The state of 
mind we call " liberalism " is possibly even more com- 
mon now among those of professed orthodox opinion 
(as in the latitudinarianism of the German universi- 
ties, or among the more intelligent Eomanists them- 
selves) than it is with the most advanced of modern 
thinkers, who are apt to be most positive and dogmatic. 
The realm of the Unseen may be fully accepted as an 
article of faith ; but it is all left by common under- 
9 



130 PASSAGE FROM DOGMA TO PURE REASON. 

standing for the religious imagination to illustrate or 
define. Belief in revelation may be as fervently pro- 
claimed as ever ; but the contents of revelation are 
left to be shaped and interpreted by the current 
philosophy of the day. Truth may be held as sacred, 
and the violation of it as unpardonable, as before ; but 
no sane man of our day would risk his reputation of 
sanity by hinting at the eternal consequences, much 
less the eternal doom, of honest error. 

This complete difference of mental atmosphere be- 
tween the Eeformation period and ours is the result 
of three centuries of controversy, analysis, and criti- 
cism, which have fairly brought the contents of relig- 
ious thought within the recognized field of philosophy. 
Eor the present, we need have nothing to do with the 
sudden widening of that field in our day by the study 
of comparative religions. Our business is strictly 
within the Christian field, and within the boundaries 
of modern Europe. 

In less than a century and a half from the first 
movement of reform, the most essential step in the 
passage from dogma to pure reason had been taken. 
Descartes (1596-1650), not Luther nor Calvin, is now 
the name of the recognized leader of thought. That 
sharp and penetrating solvent of philosophic specula- 
tion has at length brought all the old problems into 
a new form, to be studied under new conditions, and 
settled (if ever) on a basis radically different fi'om 
that defined of old. 

Of philosophy, in its broader sense, as thus taking 
the place of dogma in the common thought of men, 
there are two sides. One is a side of pure specula- 



PHILOSOPHY. 131 

tion ; the other is a side of pure observation or practice. 
Philosophy, then, in the sense we have to consider, 
has two departments, — metaphysics on one side, psy- 
chology and ethics on the other ; and we have first to 
see how the germs of these two may be traced in the 
doctrinal system of that day. 

In general terms, it may be said that speculative 
dogma — involving the Divine nature and attributes 
and the conditions of the eternal life — is represented 
to the modern mind in the problems of Metaphysics ; 
while the human side of dogma, involving the nature 
of sin and the method of redemption, is represented by 
the purely practical department of Ethics and the 
scientific expositions of Psychology. 

Now the form in which we find the Protestant 
dogma at the very start brings us at once upon the 
ground, and in view of the problems and methods, of 
these two departments of philosophy. The watchword 
of Luther, " Justification by Faith," hints that every- 
thing at issue in the destiny of the soul — that is, 
practically speaking, the entire significance of Christ- 
ianity — is staked on the believer s state of mind. 
Introspection, self-questioning, the interpreting of 
experience, — in short, all the processes of religious 
and moral psychology, — necessarily take the place 
of that definite and intelligible system of rules, by 
which the Church has explained and directed the 
religious life.* 

* Historically, the course of thought m which this is exhibited 
is known as the Osiandrian controversy, which starts with the ques- 
tion, Is grace irresistible ? It proceeds by declaring faith to be " the 
medium of the indwelling Christ " (suggesting the pure mysticism 



132 PASSAGE FROM DOGMA TO PURE REASON. 

And, ill this process, it speedily proves absolutely 
hopeless that any two serious thinkers should think 
just alike. In short, aside from one or two broad pro- 
positions held in common, anything like dogmatism 
in the field of practical religion becomes futile and 
impossible. This consequence, naturally enough, was 
not accepted, or even discerned, by those whose own 
course is a very clear proof of it to us. They held 
for a century or two, and perhaps some of them still 
hold, that justification by faith can, in the long run, 
mean something else than sincerity and freedom of 
religious thought. But, to the intelligence of the 
present day, that result is absolutely plain. 

Again, the speculative dogma of the Eeformation 
presently took, in the system of Calvin, the still mortr 
rigid form of Predestination. Its formula was the 
Eternal Divine Decree. In short, speculatively, it i» 
a system of pure religious Fatalism. This is the cen- 
tral dogma, about which are grouped all those concep- 
tions which go to make up the system of Calvinism.* 
The first sharp speculative controversy among Protes- 

of Eckhart), and assert.s that " Christ is our righteousness onlj' in 
his human nature," having, for his work of redemption, discharged 
himself of his divine attributes (hence the term Kenotisl). Osiander, 
an interpreter of Luther's doctrine in a somewhat more subjective 
and less dogmatic sense, died in 1552. 

Again, Luther's doctrine of consubstantiation opened up a con- 
troversy on the dogma of "the ubiquity of Christ's body," as 
asserted by Flacli (Flacius), which was soon found to involve 
unwelcome consequences. The points of difference were compro- 
mised in the formula of Torgau (1576), by the virtual condemnation 
of Melanchthon. Flach (1575) also held the highly mediaeval opin- 
ion that sin is "something substantial in man" (Paul's d/mpria). 

* See page 52, above. 



DOCTRINE OF DECREES. 133 

tants (that of the Arminian Eemonstrants at the Syuod 
of Dort in 1618) turns on the nature of Divine decrees 
and the possibility of moral freedom ; * and a large 
part of the discussions and decisions of the Council of 
Trent show that the Catholic mind was equally exer- 
cised with the Protestant upon this unsolvable ques- 
tion of the metaphysical relation of human life with 
Infinite Sovereignty. Still further, side by side with 
the Arminian controversy, almost exactly coincident 
with it in time, we find the moral problems started 
by the Molinists on the Catholic side, with their lax 
interpretation of Christian ethics, leading to the re- 
vived Augustinism of the Jansenists, who are properly 
enough called Calvinists within the Church. 

jN"ow a controversy of this nature may begin with 
texts and their interpretation ; but it must very soon 
get upon metaphysical ground, and involve differences 
not so much of dogmatic opinion as of philosophical 
method. Eemember, however, that it is by the 
nature of the case religious philosophy. We are still 
a century or two from a philosophy which may be 
properly termed scientific. There is this difference 
between a religious Fatalism like that of Calvin, and 
the scientific Determinism of our day, that the former 

* In the earlier stages of the controversy, the rigid Determinism 
of Flach is opposed to the " Synergism " of Melanchthon, which 
asserts the co-operation of the divine with the human will. This 
is followed, somewhat later (1589), by the protest of certain theolo- 
gians of Delft against the strict supralapsarian dogma of Beza (de- 
claring that sin and all its consequences were ordained hefore tlie 
Fall). The controversy, being submitted to Arminius, of Leyden, 
soon developed the antagonism which bore deadly fruit at Dort. — 
See, as to this whole period, Gieseler, vol. iv. pp. 435-512. 



134 PASSAGE FROM DOGMA TO PURE REASON. 

implies a living relation between Divine Will on one 
side and a sinful humanity on the other. Such a rela- 
tion can never be purely fatalistic and unmoral, like 
that to which mere scientific speculation so steadily 
drifts. Logically or not, it demands Obedience, not 
blank Submission merely, of the human subject. 

And, argue how we may, Obedience means to the 
himian mind something of choice and will. It im- 
plies, if it does not assert, — nay, if in terms it denies, 
— moral liberty. This appeal to the inextinguishable 
sense of moral freedom may be illogical in theory, or 
the will may be enthralled in practice ; but it is 
necessary to the system, so long as it remains and 
calls itself a religious system. Except religion is 
primarily a law of life, its dogma becomes pure 
fatalism, and its sentiment lapses straight to Quiet- 
ism, — that ignoblest of heresies, which was, in fact, 
the degeneracy of the later Romanism,* just as it is 
the peril of a boneless antinomian sentimental Cal- 
vinism now. 

From the hot religious controversies of the six- 
teenth century we thus find ourselves emerging, in 
the seventeenth, into a field of debate on the broad 
open ground of modern metaphysics. It is very 
interesting, in this view, to find that the tragical and 
ferocious struggle of the Thirty Years' War — which 
committed to the wager of battle that issue between 
Catholic and Protestant Germany which it was vainly 
hoped to define by the Augsburg Peace in 1555 — 
had its part in training the keen faculty, and afford- 

* See an interesting little volume, " Molinos the Quietist," by 
John Bigelow. Scribuer : New York. 



DESCARTES. 135 

ing the special opportunity, to which we owe what 
historians commonly regard as the new birth of phi- 
losophy. 

" When [says Descartes] I had spent some years in 
studying thus in the book of the world, trying to gather 
some experience, I took the resolution one day to study 
also in myself, and to bestow all the strength of my mind 
in fixing the course I had to foUow ; and in this I suc- 
ceeded far better, as I think, than if I had never with- 
drawn from my country and my books. 

" I was then in Germany, summoned thither by occa- 
sion of the war which was not yet over ; and, as I was 
returning to the army after the coronation of the Emperor, 
winter set in, and confined me to a spot where I found no 
entertaining company ; and as, fortunately, there were 
neither cares nor passions to trouble me, I stayed aU day 
long shut up in a close room {poele), where I had full 
leisure to talk with my own thoughts. And one of the 
first I set myseK to consider was this." * 

We need not follow the easy-going and chatty 
illustration in which he tells us how he came to 
reflect that what he wants first of all is unity of 
method in his opinions. With the slender scientific 
outfit of that day, " geometry, algebra, and logic," 
only one method is open to him, which is the deduc- 
tive, as opposed to generalizing from observed facts. 
The question of real moment is, How shall he find 
the premises from which he can reason in perfect 
confidence ? 

We must bear in mind, also, that he does not re- 

* Discourse de la Mithode. Part I. chap. 2. 



136 PASSAGE FEOM DOGMA TO PURE REASON. 

gard himself as " one of the elect few, whom Divine 
grace has endowed with the faculty " of dealing with 
the higher ranges of speculation. His aim is modest 
and practical, the safe conduct of his own life. Our 
interest here, then, is in the maxims or practical rules 
of thinking which he lays down, with the " firm and 
constant resolution never in a single instance to 
swerve from them." They are as follows : — 

" First, never to accept anything as true which I do not 
clearly know to be such ; that is, carefully to avoid haste 
and prejudice, and to include nothing in my judgment but 
what is so clearly and distinctly presented to my thought 
that I have no ground whatever to call it in doubt. 

" Secondly, to divide every difficult matter I have to 
investigate into as many portions as it can be, and as may 
be needed better to resolve those difficulties. 

" Thirdly, to proceed in due course, beginning with the 
simplest objects and easiest to understand, and mounting, 
little by little, by steps as it were, to the understanding of 
the more complex ; assuming also an order [of sequence] 
among those which have no natural [obvious] precedence 
among themselves. 

"Lastly, to make everywhere such complete enumera- 
tion and so broad revision, that I shall be sure that I have 
left nothing out." 

In these rules, seemingly so plain and easy, we 
appear to notice, first of all, the childlike uncon- 
sciousness of the difficulty they will lead to in prac- 
tice ; that is, if we take them as a method of the 
discovery of truth. At first sight, for example, noth- 
ing comes nearer our notion of a simple substance 
than clear water, which, in common parlance, is " the 



DESCARTES. " 137 

element " to this day ; while chemistry and physics 
both pause, as it were, on the threshold of the mar- 
vels it contains. It is quite in keeping with the 
childlikeness of this method, that Descartes himself 
despatches his speculative philosophy in a single 
youthful sketch ; while the work of his manhood 
and his real intellectual strength lay in the field of 
positive science, where his system (not his method) 
satisfied the most advanced minds of Europe till more 
than half a century after his death. 

The historical importance of the method lies not in 
any definite result that came from it, but in its offer- 
ing the first well-known example of the intellectual 
boldness which went behind the received opinions of 
the day, and the external authority they rested on, to 
find a ground of certitude in the mind itself. It is 
true that, in the matter of speculative opinion, one 
can (as the homely saying goes) "take out in the 
grist only what has gone in at the hopper." Descartes 
himself began his speculations as a devout Catholic, 
at least as one who preferred to be thought so ; and 
to this complexion, naturally enough, his opinions 
came round at last. As a child, he may have heard 
of the burning of Giordano Bruno,* who had carried 
free-thought into his opinions as well as his meth- 
ods ; and that would serve as ample warning when 
he came to be a man. 

The next thing we note is that Descartes, while 
professing a method perfectly original and indepen- 
dent, is in fact fettered, without knowing it, by older 
systems of philosophy, which furnish, so to speak, 
* February 17, 1600. 



138 PASSAGE FKOM DOGMA TO PURE REASON. 

the matter of his sub-conscious thought. It is clear 
that the value of a speculative system depends quite 
as much on the correctness of its data as on the 
accuracy of its deductions. What a man assumes he 
seems to himself to prove ; but, really, the proof is 
already contained in the assumption. Now the pos- 
tulates of Descartes — not those he supposes himself 
to start from, but those which turn up in his results 
— belong to that very Scholasticism wliich he thinks 
to explode and supersede. 

In the first place, the method is purely subjective. 
The material it works upon is what the mind finds 
by looking in upon itself. In other words, the thought 
of the mind is assumed to rei^resent truth of fact. This 
is, in short, the Mediseval realism, which regards the 
mind as a mirror open to a sphere of spiritual or ideal 
truth, which truth is to be discerned by looking at its 
reflection in the mirror. Thus, in his celebrated proof 
of the Divine existence, Descartes holds it established 
" as a general rule that all things which we conceive 
very clearly and very distinctly are all true." This is 
his major premise. The minor consists in finding in 
his thought the idea of " a Being (substance) infinite, 
eternal, immutable, independent, omniscient, omnipo- 
tent, by whom both myself and all other things that 
exist (if it is true that there are any which exist) 
have been created and produced." His conclusion is 
that, " since this idea is very clear and distinct, and 
contains in itself more objective reality than any 
other, there is none which is in itseK more true, or 
can be less suspected of error and falsity." * Such is 

* Third Meditation. 



DESCARTES: DOCTEINE OF IDEAS. 139 

the Cartesian syllogism. It reminds us at once of 
Anselm's confident demonstration,* though it does 
not contain the curious play of words on Which that 
seems to turn. 

We may observe, again, that the term " idea," here 
employed as if it were the easiest thing in the world, 
belongs to old philosophical systems, and has to un- 
dergo severe analysis in a really scientific method. 
It signifies simply " image," or " likeness." A " clear" 
or " simple " idea is supposed to be a true one, — that 
is, to represent the fact, — precisely as the image of 
a planet in a reflecting telescope is held truly to rep- 
resent the body in proportion as it is clearly defined, 
not doubled or blurred. No fallacy is in fact more 
constant or more subtile than that which thus takes 
a single sense as representing all forms of perception. 
Many philosophers never get so far as to see this 
fallacy, and reason from the visual image as if it were 
something more than the mere metaphor it is. What 
serves for a sight does not serve for a sound or a 
smeU. If philosophers had happened to be blind, we 
should never have heard of " ideas " being " stored " 
or " residing " in the mind like microscopic photo- 
graphs. As a source of knowledge, the term " idea " 
is narrow and misleading. It is, in short, a pure 
figure of speech. It denotes a process, not a fact. 
And it gradually gave way before the more vague and 
general term " impression." 

Again, this system makes much of the terms " sub- 
stance " and " attributes." Unable to reconcile the 
qualities of matter with those of mind, Descartes sup- 

* See The Middle Age, p. 199. 



140 PASSAGE FKOM DOGMA TO PURE REASON. 

poses two primary and incommunicable " substances," 
one having for its primary attribute " thought," and 
the other " extension." Having thus got a foundation 
for the two phenomenal realms of spirit and matter, 

— holding them as he does to be absolutely incapable 
of acting on each other, — he proceeds, by another 
metaphysical fiction, to invent a process by which 
spirit may act on matter ; or rather, by which the 
motion of spirit may seem as if it caused a corre- 
sponding motion of matter. This device consists in 
a name, — another bit of unconscious realism, — the 
imaginary solution of the imaginary difficulty being 
called " assistency," and the doctrine which assumes 
it being known later as " occasionalism ; " terms which 
signify that the two act, indeed, quite independently 
(but for the direct interposition of the Deity in every 
act) though with absolute correspondence, like a watch 
and a clock running together side by side in perfect 
time. 

But the term "substance," assumed all along, is 
itself a pure metaphysical fiction, as we have seen in 
discussing the doctrines of the Schoolmen.* " Sub- 
stance" and "attribute " are a mere though necessary 
piece of verbal analysis.! To make them anything 
more than a convenient device of logic is to fall 

* The Middle Age, p. 212. 

+ For example, water may be thus analyzed, logically, into its 
imaginary " substance " and its manifest " attributes " or qualities 

— fluidity, transjiarency, and tlie like, lloderu analysis descrilies 
it as compounded of hydrogen and ox3-gen, or by the sjnnbols HO 
(or HjO), because it can go no farther ; not that these symbols are 
in the least more intelligible than water itselt : they only introduce 
us to a different and wider set of relations. 



DESCARTES: MATTER AND SPIRIT, 141 

back, unconsciously, upon the old scholastic realism, 
which held, for example, in the line of theology, that 
the " substance " of a piece of bread could be taken 
away, and something different put in its place, with- 
out disturbing any one of its " attributes." Science 
knows nothing of substance and attributes in this 
sense. It knows only of things with their qualities. 
Some of these qualities may be seen at a glance ; 
some of them may be beyond the reach of our finest 
analysis. But here is the thing itself, with all its 
qualities, discovered and undiscovered. If it lacked 
any of them, it would be something else. It cannot 
possibly be thought of apart from them. 

Each of these qualities, again, probably means 
some inherent force of attraction or repulsion, — 
force being precisely the thing which is not recog- 
nized in any of these metaphysical systems. There 
is no such thing known to science as a "dead," 
" inert," or " passive " matter. Every element of it is 
essentially active, within its limited sphere of force.* 
Thus, the assumed difficulty of spirit acting on matter, 
or the reverse, is purely an imaginary difficulty, — a 
mere metaphysical ghost, which the Cartesians think 
to lay by the magic word " assistency," implying that 
the direct aid of God is needed, to give effect to the 
act of will. 

What are the properties of any given object is, 
again, purely a matter of investigation and of fact. 
The distinction of Matter and Spirit is a convenient 
one, because it answers to our consciousness, or our 
notion, of a free originating power in the human 
* See below, p. 287. 



142 PASSAGE FROM DOGMA TO PURE REASON. 

mind, which makes moral distinctions possible, as well 
as merely phenomenal ones. But, aside from this, 
there is not the least difficulty, or objection, in say- 
ing that " matter thinks," or " matter acts," any more 
than in saying that the loadstone attracts or that heat 
expands. It merely means that thought, as well as 
motion, occurs in a given series of events, under fixed 
" laws of similitude and succession." The origin of 
thought, like the origin of any form of motion, is to 
ns totally unimaginable and unknown. The only 
difference between materialism and spiritualism, of 
any relevancy to us, is that the former denies, or 
seems to deny, the fact of moral freedom. In other 
words, the difference is not speculative, but purely 
ethical. 

These metaphysical quibbles are not by any means 
a measure of Descartes' genius. This is shown, how- 
ever, in his developed algebra, in his generalized ge- 
ometry, and in the magnificent physical conception 
(known as Vortices) by which he would interpret the 
motions of the planets, much more than in the merits 
of the speculative method that goes by his name. 
Still, it is this method, not his advance in the ways 
of positive science, that brings him into the line of 
theological development, and shows him as a pioneer 
in modern thought. It is the more necessary, there- 
fore, to notice how completely, in this new line of 
departure, we find ourselves still in the range of those 
fundamental ideas which have been, consciously or 
not, involved in the conceptions of the Christian 
theology all along. 

A few steps, rapidly retraced, will bring us down 



SPINOZA. — LEIBNITZ. 143 

to that revolution of philosophic method which goes 
by the name of Kant, and makes the starting-place 
of modern speculation. 

Working on the material of Descartes, employing 
substantially the same phraseology, and fettered by the 
same philosophic tradition, Spinoza simplifies the sys- 
tem by assuming as sufficient one metaphysical " Sub- 
stance " possessing hoth the fundamental attributes of 
thought and extension ; that is to say, the substantial 
identity of mind and matter. Eeally, this was a very 
harmless metaphysical fiction, and should have been 
so regarded. But, in the view of his age, it meant 
pantheism, fatalism, the complete destruction of re- 
ligion and morality. I do not know that Spinoza 
himself made much account of it. At any rate, he 
found better work in his geometry, his optics, and 
the really great achievement of a body of scientific 
ethics. His piety was real, patient, and serene ; and 
the independence he claimed as an honest thinker he 
found easiest to win in great simplicity of living and 
in the exercise of humble manual industry. 

What Spinoza had done to advance the discussion 
opened by Descartes seemed, meanwhile, to give it a 
warp away from Christian theology and from practical 
piety. And the same, perhaps, may be said of Leib- 
nitz's extremely elaborate recast of the old metaphys- 
ical fiction in his " Monadology," and his system of 
" pre-established harmony," — all pure phantoms of 
the speculative intelligence. It is true that — as was 
said of him — he " complimented Orthodoxy as if it 
had been a lady ; " and that he gave his system a 
religious turn in his " Theodicy," or elaborated optim- 



144 PASSxVGE FROM DOGMA TO PUKE REASON. 

ism, meant to prove that this is " the best of possible 
worlds." The proof of all this, it is needless to say, 
is found in the premises he starts with, not in the 
facts he would explain it by. The system itself seems 
to invite the ghastly parody of it which Voltaire 
gave in his Candide. Leibnitz was a man of vast 
erudition, — the last, they say, and perhaps the wid- 
est, of really encyclopaedic minds. His real genius 
went into the higher mathematics, and gave the most 
intellectual form to the most advanced calculus that 
had so far been conceived. But, except for a few 
famous and helpful phrases (as the axiom of " the 
sufficient reason," for example), it does not appear 
that in his sublimer speculations he did much more 
than revolve in the orbit already traced by those who 
went before him. 

The same fictitious difficulties before spoken of 
haunted those two admirable religious thinkers, of 
brilliant, homely, and penetrating genius, Male- 
branche and Berkeley, who returned upon the prob- 
lem as Descartes had left it, and sought to give it an 
interpretation in the interest of Christian theology. 
Their solution is in the terms of a very refined specu- 
lative theism ; and they are so nearly alike to the 
common eye, that the latter of them found it neces- 
sary to explain that he had not copied from the other. 
Both are foiled by the imaginary difficulty of mind 
dealing directly with matter ; both meet it by a pure 
metaphysical fiction conveyed in a phrase of speech, 
— the unknowable interpreting the unknown. Ac- 
cording to Malebranche, " we see all things in God," 
who is "the place of spirits," and who is in imme- 



MALEBRAN CHE. — BERKELEY. 1 45 

diate relation with all things that He has made, 
including our own spirits, which are embraced in his. 
According to Berkeley, the act of perception is an 
immediate act of God upon the mind, all external 
objects being purely phenomenal, devoid of " sub- 
stance." Their esse (he says) is percipi ; that is, they 
have no other existence than in the fact of their 
being perceived. 

The logic by which Berkeley comes to this assertion 
is very simple and direct. His syllogism may be 
stated thus : First, the only objects which we directly 
perceive are Ideas {^philosophic postulate). But, sec- 
ondly, what we really perceive are the things them- 
selves (common-sense.) Hence, thirdly. Ideas are the 
only things : which accordingly exist only in the per- 
ceiving mind and may be conceived as impressions 
made upon it by the Universal Mind. He says : 
" My endeavors tend only to unite and place in a 
clearer light that truth which was before shared 
between the vulgar and the philosophers : the former 
being of opinion that those things they immediately 
perceive are the real things ; and the latter, that the 
things immediately perceived are ideas which exist only 
in the mind. Which two notions, put together, do in 
effect constitute the substance of what I advance." 
Again, he says : " I do not pretend to form any hy- 
pothesis at all. I am of a vulgar cast, simple enough 
to believe my senses, and leave things as I find them." 
He does not see, however, that the " idea," which he 
retains, is as much a fiction as the " substance," which 
he rejects. 

Or, to restate the point a little differently. All ma- 



146 PASSAGE FROM DOGMA TO PURE REASON. 

terial things are to us necessarily purely phenomenal 
That is, it is their qualities we perceive, not the things 
themselves ; or, in scholastic phrase, we know their 
"attributes," not their "substance." To the non- 
metaphysical mind this appears to be the very recon- 
dite truth, that, if we were blind, we could not see 
the object ; if we were deaf, we could not hear it, and 
so on ; and that, so far forth, the thing would not 
exist to us. In the region of metaphysical fiction 
where Berkeley conducts his argument, the mind per- 
ceives not things, but " ideas " of things ; that is, the 
images (so to speak) or impressions stamped upon the 
mind itself. These are all that we can know in our 
own consciousness ; and it is easy enough to infer 
that the " substance," which is nothing to us, is 
nothing at all in itself, — a very harmless truism, or 
else very blank nonsense, according as we take it. If 
a man has had a leg shot off by a cannon-ball, for 
example, it neither instructs him, nor comforts him 
much, to be told that God is merely producing a 
series of impressions on his mind; that the cannon- 
ball has no " substance," nor his leg either ! Byron's 
famous sarcasm is as true as it is witty : — 

" When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter — 
And proved it — 't was no matter what he said." 

Eemembering that, in fact and common-sense, we 
deal with objects and their properties, not with the 
fictions of "substance" and "attribute," neither the 
truism nor the nonsense will be likely to trouble us. 
The instructive thing for us to observe is that a very 
able and clear-headed man, in the interest of religious 



HUME. 147 

philosophy, should persuade himself that these phrases 
convey a useful and intelligible truth. In fact, read- 
ing and re-reading the charming dialogues in which 
this theory is developed, I can hardly persuade myself 
that Berkeley is not hoaxing his disciples, — disprov- 
ing, in short, by delicate irony, the " subjective ideal- 
ism " which he seems at so much pains to urge. 

A clear and passionless intelligence, like Hume's, 
with no such religious bias, found no difficulty in 
persuading itself that, if the metaphysical "sub- 
stance " is not needed for the phenomena of matter, 
no more is it needed for the phenomena of mind. 
" What we call a mind" he says, " is nothing but a 
heap or collection of different perceptions, united 
together by certain relations, and supposed, though 
falsely, to be endowed with a perfect simplicity and 
identity." * This reads like a parody of Berkeley, 
who says : "A cherry is nothing but a congeries of 
sensible impressions, or ideas perceived by various 
senses. . . . Take away the sensations of softness, 
moisture, redness, tartness, and you take away the 
cherry." Again,f " the doctrine of the immateriality, 
simplicity, and indivisibility of a thinking substance, 
is a true atheism," like that of Spinoza, to whose 
" hideous hypothesis " Hume considers that he has 
dealt an effective blow. " Generally speaking," he 
says, " the errors in religion are dangerous ; those in 
philosophy only ridiculous." 

As Berkeley, then, has reduced the material world 
to a series of perceptions, with nothing to perceive, 
so Hume reduces the whole realm of intellect an(? 

* Essays, vol. i. p. 260. t Ibid., p. 298. 



148 PASSAGE FROM DOGMA TO PURE REASON. 

emotion to a sequence of thoughts and feelings, with- 
out anything to think and feel. This is, of course, 
purely a logical reductio ad ahsurdum. So Hume, 
unquestionably, regarded it himself. To quote his 
own words : " I dine, I play a game of backgammon, 
I converse, and am merry with my friends ; and when, 
after three or four hours' amusement, I would return 
to these speculations, they appear so cold and strained 
and ridiculous that I cannot find it in my heart to 
enter into them any further. Here, then, I find my- 
self absolutely and necessarily determined to live and 
talk and act like other people in the common affairs 
of life." His universal and consistent scepticism is 
simply a final word of protest against the vanishing 
fictions of scholastic metaphysics. It appUes no- 
where else, except in the field of transcendental spec- 
ulation, dealing with no human interest whatever. 

This bland negation of the scholastic entities was 
the sagacious apprehension of his youth, not the seri- 
ous business of his manhood.* Hume soon turned 
from these barren meditations to the positive work 
of history, and the social or ethical phenomena allied 
with history. His " Essays " were felt to mean deadly 
mischief to the old dogmatic and metaphysical the- 
ology. And, so far as his work was merely negative, 
it met, naturally enough, more resentment than intel- 
ligent recognition. 

The radical and systematic scepticism of Hume, it 
wdll be noticed, is simply a scepticism as to certain 
fixed notions ingrained in the Medii\?val philosophy, 

* The Essay on Human Nature, from •which these speculations 
are taken, was written at tlie age of twenty-five. 



DESPAIR OF METAPHYSICS. 149 

aud assumed without question in all schemes of dog- 
matic theology. The terms " substance " (uTroo-rao-i?, 
or substantia) and " idea " {elho'^ or Ihea), with the 
signification attached to them, may stand as the type 
of those notions. The scholastic dialect deals largely 
with other terms of logic or metaphysics, such as 
entity, quidditij, and the like, which are treated as if 
they too somehow had an objective existence ; and 
it is hardly an extravagant caricature, when Milton, 
in a college poem, introduces ^7is, as father of the 
ten " predicaments," and a live person in the dialogue, 
— like Adam, in the old G-erman play, "going across 
the stage to be created." These were the conceptions 
of that highly elaborated and artificial style of thought 
called Scholasticism. They have become gradually 
attenuated and ghostlike through the long process we 
have just traced, — taking the most important and 
vivacious of them all, " substance," as an example, — 
until, in the analysis of Hume, we have seen them 
fade out entirely, and disappear. 

The position we have now come to is a despair of 
meta'pliysics as a method of ascertaining truth. This, 
it is perhaps needless to say, is a necessary stage in 
the progress of thought. The ground must thus be 
cleared for the advance of positive knowledge, and 
the establishing of a scientific method. Philosophy 
(as generally understood) reduces itself to a " science 
of thought." It is an analysis of subjective states of 
consciousness and operations of the mind ; no longer 
an organon for the discovery of the unknown. Pos- 
itive knowledge can deal only with observed fact. 
Knowledge of the Absolute has no place in the 



150^ PASSAGE FEOM DOGMA TO PURE EEASOK 

human understanding. And, along with metaphysical 
dogmatism, the province of theological dogmatism is 
by this process swept utterly away.* 

The reputation of Hume as a universal sceptic, 
and the theological antipathy felt towards his name 
to this day testify to the bewildered surprise with 
which thinking men — particularly, serious and sin- 
cerely pious men — suddenly found themselves bereft 
of the foundations on which they supposed them- 
selves to be standing all along. It was easy enough 
for an ordinary thinker to accept Hume's argument 
on the negative side. That superficial scepticism 
which consists in accepting such a result is, in fact, 
the symptom by which the mind of the eighteenth 
century is best known to us. Only one man seems 
to have been at once clear-sighted enough to follow 
out the principle to its consequences, patient and 
strong enough to work out the method which philo- 
sophy is hereafter bound to follow, if it is not to be a 
purely arbitrary fabrication, quite apart from the real 
beliefs and lives of men. 

We have nothing here to do with what is sys- 
tematic and technical in the Critique of Kant, any 
more than with the asperities of his nomenclature. 
Our only concern is to see how the revolution he 

* As, for example, the scholastic doctrine of the Trinity. The 
trinity as symbol ( Vorstelluny) of the Divine life in humanity, 
meanwhile, remains as periiaps the best that we can get. Thus, ac- 
cording to Dean Stanley ( " Christian Institutions"), God the Father 
signifies natural religion, God the Son historical reliqion, and God 
the Holy Ghost ^Jcrso?iaZ rdigimi, " and these three are one." Here 
all controversy is forestalled at once ; for who would care to deny 
such a trinity as that ? 



KANT. 151 

introduced stands related to religious thought, and 
affects the future of theology. Many a dogmatic 
scheme has been hazarded since his day, building 
professedly on his foundation, — here a scheme of 
elaborated metaphysics, and there a great growth of 
religious sentiment and fancy. Both these have their 
powerful fascination to large classes of minds relig- 
iously disposed ; and both, no doubt, have their real 
value and preciousness to such minds. But it is to 
be observed that such value is purely personal, sub- 
jective, experiential, noway scientific. Of objective 
validity, of scientific verification, they are quite in- 
capable ; and so, more than they reaUy deserve, they 
forfeit the respect of the modern scientific mind. 
The chief masters of abstract thought have been 
masters also of the positive science of their day. 
Their task has been to methodize and legitimate 
men's actual knowledge or belief Without that 
marriage of thought and fact philosophy is neces- 
sarily sterile. Its formal structures match, at best, 
the theories of transcendental physics : to the adept, 
a pure play of technical skill ; to the untrained, a 
blank mystery or barren curiosity ; to neither, the 
solution of any vital problem. 

The result of real moment to us from the philo- 
sophical movement that goes by the name of Kant is 
that it brings back religion upon the solid ground of 
ethics, from which it had been whirled away by the 
breezes of speculation, for so many centuries, into the 
region of metaphysical dogma. His " great thought," 
as touching our own subject, has been stated in quite 
a variety of ways. His own statement of it is very 



152 PASSAGE FROM DOGMA TO PURE REASON. 

simple and direct. The neatest and clearest para- 
phrase of it that I have seen is this : " That only the 
practical reason moves in a world of certainties ; that 
pure thought is pure scepticism ; that we know, only 
inasmuch as we act on our knowledge." * 

This wholesome maxim required, as we have seen, 
a century and a half of discussion among the ablest 
minds to bring it into the clear and definite form it 
now bears. It required a mental revolution to bring 
it into general acceptance among thinking men. It 
is not, however, anything quite new ; only the revival 
of a very old truth. " If any man will do His will, 
he shall know of the doctrine," is a warning delivered 
at the very fountain-head of Christian history. Ee- 
ligious life as against speculative dogma was the very 
point at issue between the Christian confessors of the 
second century and the arrogance of Gnostic thought. 
The incapacity of the human mind to deal with the 
Absolute is stated by Novatian, in the most orthodox 
treatise of the third century, as an accepted maxim 
of Christian philosophy. Nothing but the immense 
construction of Christian dogma afterwards, and its 
legitimation by a system of philosophy which we call 
scholastic, — supposing ourselves to be free from its 
sophisms and assumptions, — would have caused the 
surprise and alarm that were felt, when the method 
of dogma itself was challenged, and the human mind 
was bidden to return to the safe forsaken paths. 

Something more than a century has passed since 
that challenge was thrown down to the human rea- 
son ; and as a result we see, more plainly than was 

* The Spectator, Nov. 12, 1881. 



THE EESULT. 153 

possible then, what I began by stating : that the dog- 
matic part of the Christian creed passes into pure 
metaphysics, and its practical or human part into 
pure psychology and ethics. We have also seen that 
the process which has led to this result was involved 
in the Protestant formula itself, and the nature of 
the discussions which ensued as to its interpretation. 
Once afloat upon the wave of that interminable con- 
troversy, — of predestination, divine decrees, the bond- 
age of the human will, and the saving efficacy of faith, 
— the way was open to the course of thought which 
has been widening out ever since. 

Two side influences, however, have contributed to 
this result. One is the indirect effect of the growth 
of positive science, first interpreted by Bacon, of 
which I have not spoken here, because it seemed 
best to deal only with that which was spontaneously 
developed within the sphere of pure thought itself* 
The other, which is here briefly traced, is the impulse 
given to the" movement by a series of very vigorous, 
able, and independent thinkers, — men who, not con- 
tent with the accepted theories, reasoned in their own 
way upon the data given them in current dogma, until 
one by one the old spectres of metaphysics were laid ; 
and, without wishing or even suspecting it, men found 
themselves walking together upon the plain ground 
of fact. 

This result constitutes what we may call the posi- 
tive side of the Kantian method, as distinct from the 
critical or negative. It is, in fact, an emancipation 
of the intellect in the direction of pure thought, quite 

* See below, The Reign of Law. 



154 PASSAGE FEOM DOGMA TO PURE REASON. 

as much as in the direction of positive science. For it 
is to be observed that the most complete and vital 
systems of speculative philosophy — those which give 
best satisfaction to abstract thinkers, and claim high- 
est authority as interpreters of human thought — 
belong to the century which has followed the great 
work of Kant, and are part of the movement initiated 
by him. Certainly, the science of Thought is the 
noblest and most serviceable of all the sciences, un- 
less we should except the scientific interpretation of 
History, which, indeed, it may be held to include. 
Its perfect work would be to bring harmony and order 
in all the infinite complexity of men's knowledge and 
opinion. And, for that final result, not even the 
foundation could be rightly laid, until the era of dog- 
matism had been left behind, and the old metaphysi- 
cal fictions dissolved into the metaphor and symbol 
which in fact they are. 



VII. 

ENGLISH EATIONALISM. 

PAEALLEL with the line of speculative thought 
that runs from Descartes to Kant is an independ- 
ent movement of Eational Theology. That line of 
speculation, so far as concerns the current belief, was 
purely critical. Constructive theology, of any sort, 
was far from being either its motive or its immediate 
result. The opinion on such matters of those leaders 
in pure thought, when it happens to be expressed, is 
mostly conventional. Even Spinoza, when he uses the 
religious phraseology of his day, hardly varies from the 
terms of a rather mystical orthodoxy ;* and Hume, in 
his cool disdainful way, wishes to be understood as 
having no quarrel of his own with the popular belief.-f- 
It is different with that movement of rational 
theology which we have to consider now. It is, for 
one thing, essentially English. At least, it will be 
most conveniently treated as the growth of English 

* " I say," lie writes to a friend, " that it is not absolutely neces- 
sary to salvation to know Christ after the flesh ; but it is altogether 
otherwise if we speak of the Son of God, that is, the eternal Wisdom 
of God which is manifested in all things, and chiefly in the human 
soul, and most of all in Jesus Christ. "Without this Wisdom, no 
one can come into a state of blessedness. " 

t Those essays of Hume which might be regarded as a direct 
attack on revelation were not published tiU three years after 
his death. 



156 ENGLISH RATIONALISM. 

soil, and as the characteristic achievement of English 
minds. It has the gravity, the common-sense, the 
practical aim, the impatience of mere speculation, 
mere emotion, or ecclesiastical authority, which are 
held to be qualities of the best English thought. , 

To a singular degree this movement is not only inde- 
pendent, but even, we might almost say, unconscious, 
of the other. Descartes and Leibnitz, it is true, were 
both of them eagerly studied by the better minds 
in England; but mostly in the line of physics, not 
of metaphysics, and mostly too in the way of contro- 
versy. Both of them are best known, in this connec- 
tion, by their collision with Newton's magnificent 
Celestial Mechanics : Descartes — that is, the later 
school of his disciples — being worsted in obstinate 
fight against the new physical theory of the Universe ; 
and Leibnitz as discredited, in his later life, by his 
most unworthy jealousies and assaults against the 
great name of Newton.* As to that process of men- 
tal emancipation, in which both names are so illus- 
trious, it was neither needed nor much felt in the 
attempt to establish a rational theology, as that was 
now followed out in England. 

For here the shock of the Eeformation had of old 
set men's minds more completely free than they appear 
to have been upon the Continent, from the conven- 

* This jealousy, on the part of Leibnitz, arose with a dispute as 
to which was the real inventor of the Calculus, which had really 
been discovered by both, approaching it from different directions. 
And it amounted to a petulance that not only refused to accept 
Newton's theory of the celestial motions, but sought, in private 
correspondence, to injure him by the charge of irreligion. Universal 
Gravitation, as opposed to Vortices, was "atheistical." 



THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 157 

tional limits of religious opinion.* Not only theology 
was subordinate to statesmanship with the great 
ministers of Elizabeth's reign, who were a good deal 
more secular than ecclesiastical in their style of piety. 
But the bright intellects of that day in the world of 
letters were wonderfully emancipated from dogma. 
The great Elizabethan Eevival had its pagan side, — 
without the grosser moral offences of that in Italy a 
century before, but quite as far, perhaps, from the 
serious temper of the Eeformers.f 

No wonder if Puritanism repelled those genial, 
brilliant, and intrepid spirits, as much as their native 
good sense and English loyalty saved them from the 
Catholic reaction. Shakspeare leaves us no hint to 
guess what his creed might be, or what his choice 
between the creeds. He was alike remote, it is 
probable, from either. His wide, calm, and perhaps 
rather sombre view of the deeper things in life — 
what Schlegel calls his scepticism — gave the largest 
field to the free play of his genius. Sir Philip Sidney 
was a friend of G-iordano Bruno, who inscribed to him 
his audacious attack on superstition.^ Their great 
contemporary Ealeigh was charged on his trial with 

* For example, the amazing attempts to effect a compromise 
between Lutheranism and the Papacy, so as to combine harmoniously 
in one system of state-religion, into which Bossuet and Leibnitz 
had been drawn by way of correspondence, may be compared with 
the much sincerer attempts of the High-Church party in England 
to vindicate its own Catholicity. Archbishop Laud is even claimed 
to have been the real barrier that protected the Church of England 
against Popery. 

t Described with singular vigor in Taine's " History of English 
Literature," book ii. chap. i. 

t The Spaccio della Bestia trionfante. 



158 ENGLISH RATIONALISM. 

atheism, wliich reproach he might well enough share 
with mauy another illustrious name. But the faith he 
really had at heart appears to have been a very grave 
and reverent natural theism, too far in advance of his 
time to be recognized as piety. He was too resolute 
a man of action to be either a denier or a sceptic ; and 
he is cited as first on the list of those English worthies 
who led the way to the pure rationalism of the 
eighteenth century. These sober and devout ante- 
cedents separate that movement very widely, even 
the most radical forms of it, from the revolutionary 
thought of France. 

The great intelligence of Bacon did not overcome 
a conventional — what we might even call a courtly 
— way of dealing with religious questions, which 
disappoints us of finding in him the natural leader 
we might have looked for. Besides, he and minds of 
his cast were frightened from anything that lay that 
way by the portentous shapes which the new religious 
liberty was bringing forth. The great wave of national 
uplifting spent itself in an unfulfilled vision of the 
Christian Commonwealth. Not one who shared in 
that grievously foiled effort of creative genius in the 
religious life of England remained to be its interpreter, 
or to carry its spirit over into the larger intellectual 
life of another century. 

The two names of independent thinkers in that 
time of revolution are Lord Herbert of Cherbury and 
Thomas Hobbes. It is necessary here to say a word 
of each. 

Lord Edward Herbert (1581-1648) is very irrele- 
vantly put first in the catalogue of English Deists, as 



LORD HERBERT. — HOBBES. 159 

if he had led the revolt of reason which made so much 
noise a century later. His real creed was a very se- 
rious, positive, refined theism, in temper not widely 
remote from that of his brother, the saintly poet. The 
motive of his Essay was to find in natural religion 
as close a parallel as might be with the inward life 
of ecclesiastical piety, of which one element always is 
the near and tender sense of moral evil. Thus, in his 
system of a purely natural religion (as he regards it), 
a genuine sense of Sin and craving for Divine forgive- 
ness are even more marked features than that awe 
before the unknown and appalling Forces of Nature, 
which is so much more apparent in our study of 
early religious phenomena. More, perhaps, than in any 
other writer who approaches the subject from the 
point of view of Eeason, his motive is a tenderly 
nurtured, and what we may well call a Christian, 
piety.* 

Hobbes (1588-1679) is a sort of seventeenth-cen- 
tury Schopenhauer, — like the famous pessimist of 
our day in his surly view of things in general and his 
keen, surly way of stating it ; in his somewhat 
cowardly appeal to pure despotism as the only thing to 
keep other men in order and make him safe in his per- 
sonal prosperities ; and in his large, ostentatious, and 
aggressive self-conceit, as well as in the extraordinary 
vigor and penetration of his statement of truth on low 
levels, as if it were good for all levels. His trenchant 
and masculine intelligence, if it had been backed by 
any moral force, might well have brought about the 

* Lord Herbert's "Life " gives one of the most curious glimpses 
to be found of the court and person of Louis XIIL 



160 ENGLISH RATIONALISM. 

philosophical new birth which he seems to have at- 
tempted. Fortunately, character is for such an issue 
even more important than intellect. The impression 
he made on the mind of his time was strong, compel- 
ling a respect that shaded towards dismay. Pungent 
and quotable, he was looked up to by smaller men, 
and cited as an oracle. So great, indeed, is his repu- 
tation for a certain rude and insolent strength, that 
one is disappointed to find, when he comes to touch on 
religious things, that he is quite in the trodden track 
of conventional opinion ; is even ostentatiously ortho- 
dox, so far as language goes. Convictions of his own 
he probably had not any. The State, according to 
his theory, was founded " not in the mutual good-will 
men had towards each other, but in the mutual fear 
they had of each other."* His solution of the reli- 
gious difficulty is that the Sovereign shall find his 
subjects in their creed, and that the practices of piety 
shall be enforced by the strong arm of Law. Specu- 
lations of this nature could not help much towards 
the settling of religious issues. 

But the same storm which drove Hobbes to the 
Continent to brood over his creed of despotism, while 
it called Milton home to battle for his faith of liberty, 
had its share also in training the youth of that grave 
wise thinker, who did more than any other man to 
educate the next generation into the way of thinking 
most fit for Englishmen. 

The philosophy of Locke (1632-1704) has been 
very much disparaged in our day. Brutally crude 
De Maistre calls it, railing at its homely terminology. 

* Essay on liberty. 



LOCKE. 161 

It is thin and superficial, leading straight to material- 
ism and unbelief, says the transcendental philosophy, 
which claims acquaintance with the Absolute. It 
would be idle to attempt an answer to either charge. 
Our business is with Locke as an educator of English 
thought at a particular religious crisis, and as leader 
in a movement which has had great results in critical 
theology ; not with the adequacy of his opinions or 
his method to the greater intellectual demands of the 
present day. 

Looking, then, at the writings of Locke for the 
positive qualities to be found in them, we are struck 
first of all by the familiar modern tone in which they 
speak to us. Something of this, no doubt, is from 
the pure homeliness of his diction, which is some- 
times, too, about as pungent and caustic as that of 
Hobbes, without his cynicism and rancor. But, still 
more, it is from the fact — which we are getting 
slowly wonted to — that the era of storm and revolu- 
tion is at length behind us, and we have emerged 
into the atmosphere of modern life. 

Taking the convenient boundary of the Eeforma- 
tion-period at 1650, we meet John Locke as a studi- 
ous and grave youth of eighteen, — too young to have 
shared with Milton in the passion of the revolution- 
ary struggle, but not too young to have had his own 
reflections upon the strange chaos of religious opinions 
which that storm had drifted into view. The modern- 
ness of his thought begins to appear as soon as we 
compare the earliest of his writings with the latest 
of Milton, — perhaps not ten years apart : in one a 
style antique as Plato, an idealism and a rhetoric that 
11 



162 ENGLISH RATIONALISM. 

have at their nearest a foreign and far-off tone to us ; 
in the other a plainspoken and level prose, dealing 
precisely with those questions of reflection, of educa- 
tion, of political economy, closest at hand in our 
every-day thoughts on the conduct of life. This easy 
and familiar diction deceives us by making the man 
seem nearer to us than he is ; and so it keeps us from 
doing justice to the real originality and merit of the 
work he did. 

That revolutionary storm — the Great Eebelhon 
in England, coinciding with the Thirty Years' War 
abroad — had proved the impotence of ecclesiastical 
methods or state alliances or authority of creeds or 
sectarian processes and protests to deal with ques- 
tions that must, after all, be brought before the bar 
of individual reason. A century and a haK of strug- 
gle had been spent in demonstrating, on a grand 
scale and in sight of all men, what was really implied 
when the Eeformation announced for its first principle 
the integrity of the private conscience, and for its 
watchword, Salvation by Faith. Leaving all that 
controversy out of sight, the true task for a religious 
thinker is — the more coolly, the more devoid of 
religious passion or emotional fervor, so much the 
better — to take up the subject at first-hand, in the 
light of plain and practical common-sense. And for 
such a task the time had plainly come. 

This we may conceive to be the state of the case 
as it lay in the mind of Locke. He approached the 
question deliberately, late in life, and when he had 
already painfully wrought out the principles of his 
intellectiAal method. His argument is a natural se- 



LOCKE. 163 

quel to the " Essay on the Understanding." * We 
cannot praise the brilliancy of the result. His 
" Eeasonableness of Christianity " is doubtless (as the 
phrase goes) an epoch-making book. But it is also 
a disappointing book. Its chief merit is in its having 
been written at all ; that is, in having been written 
with that motive, and from that point of view. Still, 
this is a real merit, and a great one. It took the 
grandest and most fundamental of all practical ques- 
tions — one which governments, armies, and folios 
innumerable had dealt with vainly, and were dismiss- 
ing as hopeless — out of the limbo of metaphysical 
polemics, and committed it once for all to the practi- 
cal understanding of men, let the result be what it 
would. 

In religious opinion Locke was a sober and devout 
Englishman, of an average type, his rationalizing 
temper sliding easily to what is often claimed as the 
Unitarian dogma. It was, really, a form of Arianism, 
like Milton's. And, like his, it was the result of a 
literal rendering of texts, without any conscious natu- 
ralistic bias, or any suspicion of what at this day we 
should call a rationalizing criticism. Unlike Milton's, 
however, which remained for more than a century 
and a half unknown, the Arianism of Locke had a 
great and immediate effect on English thought, and 
is reflected pretty constantly in the Anglican theology 
for a century or more, till driven out by the winds 
of more recent speculation, German or other. Of 
biblical criticism, unless it might be the verifying 

* This " Essay" was published in 1689 ; the " Reasonableness " 
in 1695. 



164 ENGLISH EATIONALISM. 

of texts, he knew and could know nothing. His 
method of investigation was the very simple and ob- 
vious one, — which only needed that clear, sagacious, 
and honest understanding to suggest, — to search the 
record, and by the canons of plain sense to determine 
what Christianity is. Its reasonableness and its 
authority will depend on the answer we give this 
question first. 

The answer is simple. It is, that Jesus is the 
Messiah in the precise and literal sense in which he 
was announced to the Jewish people. Only, we must 
interpret that sense to the understanding of our day. 
So interpreted, it will mean that he is the Divinely 
appointed sovereign of human life, especially of 
conscience and conduct, which are the ultimate thing 
in human life. His teachings are, in the strictest 
official sense, the Laws of his Kingdom ; and these 
are readily shown to be rules for the regulation 
of human conduct, with penalties duly annexed and 
specified for their violation. 

Apart from detail, and from the obvious deduc- 
tions which follow, this is the sum of the argu- 
ment of Locke's " Eeasonableness." The illustra- 
tions from history and prophecy, the adaptation to 
the common needs and conditions of human life, 
we easily take for granted as they are here urged 
and dwelt on. 

As to the profounder conviction, the passionate emo- 
tion, the inward conflict and crisis, which make so 
large a part in the religious life as it is commonly 
known to us, or as it is seen as one of the mighty 
agents in human affairs, — all that is passed over, 



LOCKE. 165 

purposely as we may suppose, and studiously. It 
was not in Locke's temperament to enter much, either 
by sympathy or imagination, into that view of the 
case. It would be rather his wish to avoid what had 
been so lately the signal for fanaticism and strife, just 
as his main position is a barrier thrown up against 
any possible pretension of religion in the sphere of 
politics. His business is to get a solid foundation 
for religious belief and the practice of righteousness 
in the Christian record soberly interpreted ; and so 
to save Christianity itself, as he might well think, 
to the sober and rather sceptical understanding of 
his own day. 

Now a defence of religion which does not take into 
view any such features of it as religious passion, enthu- 
siasm, fanaticism, may indeed furnish an excellent 
practical rule of life for quiet times, for well-regulated 
minds. Perhaps the religious battle whose smoke and 
din had hardly passed off might make this view of it 
seem the best and only safe view. But how far it is 
from being a complete view, every page of religious 
history tells. That extreme repugnance to anything 
like " enthusiasm," so conspicuous in the religious 
dialect of English respectability, down even to our 
own time, if not the direct consequence of the turn 
given by Locke to religious discussion, is at any rate 
in close keeping with it. In short, while the moral 
debasement of the religious life in England during 
the last century may be laid to the State Church, 
and the infinitely discreditable mingling of sacred 
things with politics, — the frigid rationalism of relig- 
ious thought in the same period is the logical follow- 



166 ENGLISH RATIONALISM. 

ing-out of the method of treatment brought into vogue 
by the great authority of Locke. 

Locke, however, does not stand alone in his attempt 
to bring religion within the bounds of human reason. 
There were two other influences working in the same 
general direction, though from quite opposite quarters 
of the intellectual sky. These two were the specula- 
tive philosophy of a group of thinkers whom we know 
as the English Platonists ; and the method of Geom- 
etry and Physics, which had achieved such splendid 
results in the realm of natural science as interpreted 
by Newton. 

In a quiet and studious retreat from the storm 
of political revolution that had raged so long, we find 
the company of " latitude-men about Cambridge." 
They are cultivated scholars. Plato was doubtless 
much nearer to them than Descartes or Newton. They 
are men of a serene, devout, and intellectual type of 
piety, dwelling far from tlioughts and things of their 
own day. Eeligious indifferentism they attacked 
under the classic name of Epicurus, and the materi- 
alizing tendencies of science they sought to confute 
by patient examination of the system of Democritus. 
These ancient names seem far enough away from the 
practical issues of their stormy century ; and it would 
not appear that this admirable school of Christian 
philosophers had much effect, outside a narrow circle 
of elect souls. 

The best known names among them are those of 
Ealph Cudworth (1617-88) and Henry More (1614- 
87). Their great monument is Cud worth's "True In- 
tellectual System of the Universe." This magniloquent 



THE PLATONISTS. — THE NEW PHYSICS. 167 

title is fairly enough matched by the wealth of erudi- 
tion, the ponderous logic, the fertility of illustration, 
the independent and even eccentric line of specula- 
tion,* which make that remarkable treatise a ser- 
viceable authority to the student in philosophy to 
this day. 

Very different, however, from the effect of this 
elaborate and esoteric school of learned thought was 
the splendid advance now made in the line of physical 
discovery. This had at length touched the common 
imagination. It seemed fairly to have endowed the 
intellect with a new instrument for finding out truth. 
Bacon in his Novum Organon had proclaimed its 
coming afar off; and now Bacon began to be known 
as the characteristic, splendid, and transcendent genius 
of the English intellectual world. If not the dis- 
coverer, he was at any rate the prophet and the fore- 
runner. It is not likely that the men who really 
led in this great movement of Science — Newton at 
their head — felt any obligation of their own to that 
masterly and brilliant rhetoric which had heralded 
their achievem.ents. But unquestionably it had done 
very much to prepare the intellectual soil in which 
this particular plant was now to flourish. 

Nay, more. Not only science, so interpreted, 
promised the conquest of Nature to men's uses : it 
promised still greater things in the reign of pure 
thought. It would not only subdue the earth, but 
would scale the heavens. "What it had done, trium- 
phantly, in explaining the system of the physical 

* As in tlie argument about the "Plastic Nature," a sort of 
Gnostic Demiurgus. 



168 ENGLISH RATIONALISM. 

universe was done all the more triumphantly because 
it was, as it were, a national victory ; and so an 
Englishman's adopting of it had in it the pride of 
loyalty to his flag as well as a simple accepting of the 
fact. It was, besides, an earnest of what it would do 
in a still more obscure and controverted realm. What, 
indeed, should be impossible to a method that had 
already accomplished so much ? Geometry and Phy- 
sics had been victorious in explaining the visible 
system of the heavens. Would not the method of 
geometry and physics prove the solvent, after all, of 
the theological problem ? Would it not, at least, 
show how religious truth can be made to stand on 
the same solid ground of demonstration ? 

It is to some such motive as this, though perhaps 
not consciously thought out, that we may fairly enough 
ascribe the next marked step in the development of 
a rational theology. Samuel Clarke (1675-1729) 
was a disciple of Newton, a mathematician of real 
eminence, strong in his conviction that truth of aU 
sorts should be proved by way of axiom, postulate, 
and geometrical deduction. His argument for the 
" Being and Attributes of God," as the foundation of 
Natural Religion, is to this day an accepted text- 
book of the method of demonstration as applied to 
truths which really appeal rather to the conscience 
and imagination.* 

In what we may call the physical attributes of Deity 
— that Infinitude, Almightiness, Omnipresence, which 
we predicate of Absolute Being — the method serves 
well enough. At least, step by stej), it challenges 

* Read as the " Boyle Lectures " of 1704-1705. 



CLAKKE. 169 

the intellect to make a formal denial, or to retreat 
from any of its positions. The logical gap appears 
as soon as we come to deal with those moral attri- 
butes, which are precisely what make the difference 
between the Absolute which we assert and the 
God whom we adore. Here these processes of the 
understanding break down. Conscious intelligence, 
free-will, and moral choice are attributes which we 
can know only by our own experience of them ; which 
we ascribe to God only because we project our thought 
or emotion upon the background of Infinity, — not 
because our geometry can prove them, or because we 
find them in our conception of Universal Law. 

The value, then, of any such scheme as Clarke's lies 
in its premises, not in its deductions. One must be 
a very confirmed theist indeed, to find satisfaction in 
the argument.* The religious data which it affects 
to prove are either taken for granted unconsciously^ 
at the outset, and so are really data of religious expe- 
rience put in logical form and sequence ; or else they 
are interpolated, more or less awkwardly, in the course 
of the argument. In fact, when it comes to the criti- 
cal turn he confesses as much, and frankly steps out 
of the logical circle to gather up new material by 
the way. Nay, when he goes on to apply his reason- 
ing to historical revelation, — the real goal which he 
would reach, — we find him dealing no longer with 
assumed certainties, but with slender probabilities. 

The saving point in his argument is the fact that 

* Clarke himself was such a sincere and revering theist. It was 
especially noted of him by Voltaire, that he never spoke the name 
of the Deity but with a certain manner and tone of awe. 



170 ENGLISH RATIONALISM. 

it is addressed to a state of mind which Las no motive 
to detect the fallacy, but rather a strong interest the 
other way. To a mind in that state the logical form 
disguises the substantial defect. The truth, which is 
believed already, is supposed to be confirmed by a 
process that betrays its weakness the moment it is 
submitted to a critical or unbelieving mind. Such 
as it was, however, the argument of Clarke held for 
more than a century its place in the Schools, where 
it was accepted in entire good faith, and where, very 
likely, it is still appealed to as a real demonstration 
of religious truth. 

A mind grave, slow, serious, exceedingly candid, 
fundamentally ethical in tone, and somewhat sombre 
in its cast of thought — such was the mind of Bishop 
Butler (1692-1752) — must see the case too wisely to 
stake belief on such an issue. Butler's real eminence 
is as a moral psychologist. His chief constructive 
work is the vindication of ethical conceptions as a 
fundamental fact in human nature. When a man 
sees and obeys the right, as against the prompting of 
self-love, or any interest of his own which he is able 
to calculate or foresee, then he proves the existence of 
that fundamental fact. Butler's " Sermons on Human 
Nature" have the conceded merit of bringing this 
point, on which all the possibilities of personal religion 
turn, clearly into the foreground, and of fixing it in 
the consciousness of all who are willing to follow him 
in his argument. 

To such a mind the geometric method of estabhsh- 
ing religious truth must needs be painfully inadequate. 
Butler does not enter into any controversy with Clarke. 



171 



In one sense, they had both the same thing to prove, 
and only different ways of proving it. One deals with 
the smoothest abstractions of pure thought ; the other 
with the hardest facts of real life. Clarke approaches 
historical Christianity by way of axiom, postulate, and 
deduction. Butler achieved the theological master- 
piece of his century by a course of illustrative reason- 
ing, to show the " Analogy of Religion, natural and re- 
vealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature."* 

One is tempted, just here, to contrast his treatment 
with the spontaneity and joyousness which we find in 
the great expressions of ancient faith, — in the He- 
brew Psalms and Prophets, for example; or with 
that infinitely more serene and cheerful faith which 
we constantly find associated with the liberal thought 
of our own day. But the contrast would not be just 
to the position which Butler holds. He was committed, 
by public station and doubtless by sincere belief, to 
the defence not of the glad and comforting convictions 
of a natural piety, but of a system which had in it 
many things which the natural reason finds hard to 
accept, hard to be reconciled to, hard even to pardon 
in those who sincerely hold them. His own mind 
was naturally of a sombre cast, as was just said ; and 
these difficulties, moral even more than intellectual, 
were very present to his thought. The key-note to 
his whole discourse is the words found in the intro- 
duction : that, granting the system of Nature and the 
Christian scheme of salvation to have proceeded from 
the same Author, " we must expect to find the same 
difficulties " in the one as in the other. 
* Published iu 1736. 



172 ENGLISH EATIOXALISM. 

This, it must be confessed, is a harsh and discour- 
aging key-note. To add to the plaintiveness of it, 
Butler is keenly conscious that he is addressing a 
generation which, with undoubting profession of natu- 
ral theism, was fast growing disaffected to the whole 
scheme of that official theology, which he is bound to 
uphold. One may easily find something depressed 
and reluctant in the tone in which so excellent a man 
finds himself obliged to hint at the terrors and menaces 
which that theology has in reserve. He feels at heart 
that an argument ad terrorem is bad in logic, however 
useful it may be to serve a desirable end.* 

Besides, the nature of the argument, as he himself 
puts it, obliges him to bring the " difficulties " to the 
front. Those in our common experience of things, 
which cannot be denied, must be set off against those 
in the articles of dogma, which men are very eager to 
deny. " If plagues and earthquakes break not Heaven's 
design," — and you will admit (he says) not only that 
such things are, but that they are Heaven's design, — 
then on what ground can you possibly object to the 
likelihood of judgments infinitely more dreadful in the 
unseen world ? If we every day find the innocent 
suffering for the guilty, and the tender-hearted con- 
tinually taking up the burden of others' calamity and 
grief, then what have we to say against the scheme 
of the Vicarious Atonement, which asserts that the 
same holds good as the universal law? How do we 

* It is observable that, while Butler speaks of retribution in the 
future life as the result of general (spiritual) laws, he nowhere hints 
— as he so easily might — at their possible disciplinary or even pur- 
gatorial character, though this last is the familiar doctrine of the 
Eastern Church. 



BTJTLEK. 173 

know that it is not the only condition by which the 
Divine wrath may be pacified, and the Elect received 
into eternal joys ? 

Truly this argument is not an amiable persuasive 
to piety ! Our natural feeling about such things is 
not any better reconciled to infinite horrors by finding 
ever so many finite ones that cannot be gainsaid ; or 
to a scheme which on the face of it is the deification 
of favoritism and injustice, by seeing that justice is 
ever so imperfectly carried out before our eyes. The 
natural man, if he has the average courage along 
with a rough sense of right and wrong, resents being 
hullied into accepting what looks to him both unrea- 
sonable and unfair, by hints (such as abound in Butler) 
that it will be for his interest to accept it and make 
the best of it. This moral difficulty lies at the very 
threshold of Butler's method ; and he knows it. 

One thing more. I have spoken of the probable 
effect of this argument with the rude average mind, 
half inclined to religious belief of some sort, — which 
we may assume to have been the ordinary scepticism 
of Butler's day. It is still another thing when we con- 
sider the scepticism of our own day, which has learned 
to talk glibly of an unconscious Absolute, and a law 
of impersonal evolution, even if it has not accepted 
the dogma of a downright pessimism. To such scepti- 
cism as this, Butler's argument is, as Dr. Martineau 
has called it, " a terrible persuasive to atheism." If it 
is true that natural and moral evil are the prevailing 
thing in human life, — if they are to be thrust in our 
faces and compelled upon our thought in the very 
front of our discussion of religious verities, — then 



174 ENGLISH RATIONALISM. 

surely our best refuge is to believe in no governing 
Mind at all, and in no Future which is so prodigiously 
to exaggerate the horrors and wrongs of this life. Best 
content ourselves as we may with the narrower hori- 
zon, which at least allows us to forget that Universe 
of despair. 

This would not be quite a complete answer to But- 
ler's argument, since he both keeps veiled the more 
shocking features of his creed, and includes a good 
many considerations not covered by that bald state- 
ment of his main position, — particularly the funda- 
mentally moral character of the Divine judgments. 
Still less would it be a fair charge against the man, 
who was excellent to the core, just, humble-minded, 
and merciful. But it is a fair charge against that 
which is, after all, the fatal thing in the scheme of 
theology which he professed. At least, it helps us 
to see how that scheme is already discredited to the 
human reason ; how it is standing on its defence in 
the face of formidable attack ; how the burden of 
proof is now thrown upon that side ; how it can no 
longer dictate terms to the common mind, as a cen- 
tury before, but must accept such terms as it can get 
admitted in equal debate. 

In short, the appeal to Reason, which was made by 
Locke in perfect simplicity of good faith, has served 
to invite a new enemy into the field. The discussion 
he has opened is far wider than the naiTow limits 
which he had proposed for it. The three works 
which I have briefly noticed may be said to com- 
plete the task of English constructive theology in the 
last century. Down almost to our own day, that 



THE APPEAL TO EEASOK 175 

theology has stood on the defensive. Its literature 
is a literature of apology. It is sometimes very 
learned and able, as conspicuously in the " Credibil- 
ity " of Lardner. Sometimes it deals hard and telling 
blows at the adversary, as in the heat of the Deistical 
controversy. Sometimes it brings a vigorous good 
sense, a clear and manly conviction of right and 
wrong, into the business of religious exposition, as in 
a great body of practical divinity of which Sherlock 
may be taken as the best type. 

In general, however, the theology of the eighteenth 
century is not reckoned to do the highest honor either 
to the mind or heart of England. It is too much 
embarrassed by the falsity of its position, as having 
taken a brief to defend an official creed. It is too 
conscious of a hostile temper in the mental and Kt- 
erary atmosphere. It yields to the fatality that besets 
a campaign too purely defensive, and finds itself, as 
the century wears on, getting discouraged, attenuated, 
and thin. From the vigorous sense of Locke, from 
the generous ethics of Butler, it is a long way down 
to the " Evidences " and the " Moral Philosophy" of the 
wise and excellent Archdeacon Paley (1743-1805). 

In all this wide and rather sluggish current of Eng- 
lish theological literature of the eighteenth century, 
there runs an undertone which betrays an uneasy 
consciousness of the presence of an enemy. This en- 
emy might be stigmatized, or silenced, or overawed ; 
but he would never own himself defeated in fair battle. 
The challenge of Eeason had invited a line of attack 
against which the old weapons did not serve. That 
challenge had been taken up — with no conspicuous 



176 ENGLISH RATIONALISM. 

ability, but with great pertinacity and in entire good 
faith — by a series of writers who have attracted more 
fame, perhaps, than they deserve, under the name of 
the English Deists. 

The Deistical Controversy, so called, occupies almost 
exactly the first half of the eighteenth century. It 
began in 1696, with the argument of Toland, who 
proposed only to follow out more consistently the 
views of Locke, put forth the year before. It ended 
with the publication in 1748 * of a treatise on Mira- 
cles by Conyers Middleton,f which may be held to 
mark the position taken at length by the most ration- 
alizing of the English conservative divines. 

The general aspect which the controversy presents, 
considered as a chapter in the history of thought, has 
been thus described by Mr. Leslie Stephen : — 

" It would be difficult to mention a controversy in 
which there was a greater disparity of force. The physi- 
ognomy of the books themselves bears marks of the differ- 
ence. The deist writings are but shabby and shrivelled 
little octavos, generally anonymous, such as lurk in the 
corners of dusty shelves, and seem to be the predestined 
prey of moths. Against them are arrayed solid octavos 
and handsome quartos, and at times even folios, — very 
Goliaths among books, — too ponderous for the indolence 
of our degenerate days, but fitting representatives of the 
learned dignitaries who compiled them. J 

* Hume's "Essays" were published the same year ; his "Dia- 
logues on Natural Religion " in 1779. 

t University librarian at Cambridge, and author of the " Life 
of Cicero." 

+ A full illustration of this capital picture may be found in the 
alcoves of Harvard University Library, which is disproportionately 
rich in this department of literature. 



THE DEISTS. 177 

" On the side of Christianity, indeed, appeared all that 
was intellectually yenerable in England. Amongst the 
champions of the faith might be reckoned Bentley, incom- 
parably the first critic of the day ; Locke, the intellectual 
ruler of the eighteenth century ; Berkeley, acutest of Eng- 
lish metaphysicians and most graceful of philosophic writ- 
ers ; Clarke, whom we may still respect as a vigorous glad- 
iator, and then enjoying the reputation of a great master of 
philosophic thought ; Butler, the most patient, original, 
and candid of philosophical theologians ; Waterland, the 
most learned of contemporary divines ; and Warburton, 
the rather knock-kneed giant of theology, whose swashing 
blows, if too apt to fall upon his alKes, represented at least 
a rough intellectual vigor. Around these great names 
gathered the dignitaries of the Church, and those who 
aspired to church dignity ; for the dissection of a deist 
was a recognized title to obtaining preferment. . . . 

" The ordinary feeling for the deist Avas a combination 
of the odium theologictcm with the contempt of the finished 
scholar for the mere dabbler in letters. The names, indeed, 
of the despised deists make but a poor show when com- 
pared with this imposing list. They are but a ragged 
regiment, whose whole ammunition of learning was a 
trifle when compared with the abundant stores of a single 
light of orthodoxy ; whilst in speculative ability most of 
them were children by the side of their ablest antag- 
onists. . . . 

"At the end of the deist controversy, indeed, there 
appeared two remarkable writers. Hume, the profound- 
est as well as the clearest of English philosophers of the 
century, struck a blow the echo of which is still vibrating ; 
but Hume can scarcely be reckoned among the deists. He 
is already emerging into a higher atmosphere. Conyers 
Middleton, whose attack upon [ecclesiastical] miracles 



178 ENGLISH EATIONALISM. 

eclipsed for a time that of his contemporary, was a formi- 
dable though covert ally of Deism, but belongs to the 
transition to a later period." * 

* " History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century," vol. 
i. pp. 86-88. Few writers can have had both the motive and the 
patience to master this rather dreary chapter of modern literature ; 
and it is matter of thankfulness that it has been done for once, with 
such intelligent vigor, by Mr. Stephen. I have examined, I believe, 
all the writers of this class whom he cites except Annet. 

A list of some of the best known deistical writings, prepared 
with the aid of Mr. Stephen's book, may here be convenient. The 
entire controversy, it will be seen, turns in general on speculative 
argument, not on historical criticism. 
ToLAND : " Christianity not Mysterious " (1696). Sequel to Locke : 

" Rationalism applied to Dogma, not to Fact." 
Collins : " Discourse on Freethinking " (1713). Implying (but not 

asserting) denial of Supernaturalism. 
WoLLASTON : " The Religion of Nature Delineated" (1722). Sequel 

to Clarke : including the moral argument for Immortality from 

the misery in the world. 
WooLSTON : " Six Discourses " (1727). Absurdity of the Argument 

from Miracles (coarse ridicule). 
TiNDAL : "Christianity as old as the Creation" (1730). The 

difficulties of an historical revelation. 
Chubb : "Tracts" (8 vols., 1730). Anti-sacerdotal : the simplic- 
ity of Christ's doctrine. 
Morgan : " The Moral Philosopher " (1737). A " Christian Deist " : 

weakness of the argument from Miracles. 
DoDWELL, H. : " Christianity not founded on Argument" (1742). 

Faith is the abnegation of Reason. 
Annet: "The Resurrection of Jesus examined" (1744). Reply 

to Sherlock's " Trial of the Witnesses " (violently hostile and 

scornful). 
MiDDLETON : "Free Inquiry" as to early Ecclesiastical Miracles 

(1748). There is "no breach of continuity between sacred and 

profane history." 
BoLiNGBEOKE : " Letters on History" (1753). An attack on The- 
ology generally. 
Hume : " Natural History of Religion " (1779). Including the 

Argument against Miracles from the Universal Order. 



THE DEISTS. 179 

The details of this long controversy must be left to 
the literary historian. A very brief view of certain 
points suggested in it, or of impressions that result 
from a general study of it, is all that can be admitted 
here. 

Coming to the reading of the deistical writings 
with the ordinary prepossessions about them, one 
finds, with some surprise, that most of them are not 
— in profession at least — attacks upon Christianity. 
At least, there is nothing on the face of it to convict 
the writers of ill faith in what they profess to mean 
as defence and not attack. It is hard to see how 
Toland's " Christianity not Mysterious," or Tindal's 
" Christianity as old as the Creation," is not fully as 
legitimate a vindication as Locke's " Eeasonableness 
of Christianity." They do not, as yet, assail even the 
supernatural element in the biblical record. Doubt- 
less they go farther on the same road that Locke had 
travelled ; and doubtless the more modest beginning 
led the way to sharper and more radical attacks. 

The ostensible defence may even have been really 
a covert attack. Locke had already gone in that 
direction as far as it was safe to go ; and the profes- 
sional theologians who followed him preferred to keep 
the discussion within the lines they deemed prudent, 
and resented that unwelcome intrusion on their do- 
main. But, after making every allowance, the sur- 
prise remains that the alarm was sounded so soon, 
and that the discussion at once bred so much ill blood. 
It was a thin boundary, at best, that parted the 
rationalizing theologian from his rationalistic oppo- 
nent. From the point of view of our own day, the 



180 ENGLISH RATIONALISM. 

" Deist " of the eighteenth century would easily retain 
his " Christian " standing without reproach. 

This remark does not apply, of course, to some of 
the later deists, as Annet, Woolston, and Chubb ; still 
less to the downright revolutionary assault of Thomas 
Paine, at the end of the century. But, on the other 
hand, as the discussion deepened in acrimony, it 
brought out things quite as bad on the orthodox side 
as anything they were meant to answer. Waterland's 
defence of the Bible, at the points which had been 
assailed by a criticism that at least was made in the 
name of morals, decency, and humanity, — such, for 
example, as the atrocities of the Conquest, — is full 
as brutal as anything he replied to. It is far more 
damaging to the cause of religion than the worst 
things that can be quoted from the deists.* 

The best excuse that can be made for such things 
is that they are, after aU, but following in the steps 
of Butler ; and, by the standard of that day, Butler 
is both a wise man and a saint. It is but running 
out, into gross exaggeration and unconscious travesty, 
the argument of the " Analogy ; " and this had been 
amply sanctioned by the best esteemed theologians of 
the time. In its moral effect, the controversy thus 
did the great service, that it forced the havd of the 
popular theology. Surely, it was quite as important 
that Eeligion should be reconciled with the general 
conscience of men, as with the exigencies of an estab- 
lished Church, or with those of its official defenders. 

Intellectually, the effect of the controversy is most 

* See Stephen's " History of English Thought," voL i. pp. 258- 
260. 



THE HISTOEICAL METHOD. 181 

plainly seen in the pre-eminence now given to the 
historical evidences of Christianity. In one way, this 
was a great gain. The attitude of self-defence is at 
best a humiliating one ; all the more, when a creed 
dominant for a thousand years must defend itself 
before the very tribunal which it has created and 
invoked. The historical method opened up, in com- 
parison, a dignified and healthy occupation for the 
theological mind. In such works as Lardner's " Cred- 
ibility " (1723-43), it shows not only a genuine learn- 
ing, but an intellectual modesty, patience, and breadth, 
which very much redeem the damaged reputation of 
this period in theology. Most of the better-known 
names in this field, for something like a century, are 
the names of those who took that track. Leslie's 
"Short and Easy Method" (1697), Sherlock's "Trial 
of the Witnesses" (1729), West "On the Eesurrec- 
tion " (1727), and Paley's " Evidences " (1794), all fol- 
low the historical method with more or less success, 
and hold their ground in some quarters as authorities 
till now. 

But the historical method has perils of its own, no 
less than the metaphysical. If the element of reason 
is to be admitted at all, history offers it the widest 
and most inviting field. Historical criticism, in fact, 
means nothing else than unsparing rationalism applied 
to alleged facts of history. It speedily leaps the boun- 
dary set to separate sacred from profane. It must 
not refuse to apply its canons, as to fact and legend, 
with absolute impartiality. Once quit the realm of 
metaphysics, once abandon the defences of church 
authority, the result is plain. Virtually, modern criti- 



182 ENGLISH RATIONALISM. 

cism accepts the method of the Deists, while it cavils 
at their positions, and treats their poor scholarship 
with a pitying disdain. It is very significant that 
the two English historians of recognized eminence, in 
this age of the Apologists, are Hume and Gibbon. 

It is still more significant, that what the contro- 
versy could not do by the crude and acrid processes 
of party warfare has been peacefully done, almost 
without controversy, by the solvent of a more radical 
philosophy and a riper scholarship. The English 
Church, which a century ago thought it must find 
salvation by such discreditable methods as those of 
Waterland and Warburton, now accepts unchallenged 
in its highest places of preferment such names as 
those of Professor Jowett, Dean Stanley, and Bishop 
Colenso. These names represent a rationalism far 
more intelligent and thorough-going than that which 
their predecessors of the last century dared not 
tolerate.* 

The solvent which has soaked all hardness out of 
the Articles of that Church, leaving them to take any 
shape or meaning that may be in demand, was elabo- 
rated by a long course of critical study, directed by a 
very plastic and refined philosophy, peculiar to our 
century. We may condemn the casuistry which per- 
mits a man to sign Articles he pretends to no belief 

* The Eev. Stopford Brooke (it is understood) was urgently 
pressed by Dean Stanley not to abandon his position in the Church, 
after his rationalistic attitude had been openly pronounced ; and 
Archbishop Tait was as urgent to retain Mr. Voysey, by any possi- 
ble latitude of interpretation, as the churchmen of a hundred years 
ago would have been to exaggerate and stigmatize his 
See London Inquirer of Dec. 23, 1882. 



TEMPEK OF THE DEISTS. 183 

in, — the stigma of Broad-Church liberalism. At 
least, the insolent bigotry, which Johnson gloried in 
and Burke was not quite free from, is no longer pos- 
sible to-day. The deistical controversy had its full 
share in bringing the new liberty to pass. 

One other thought occurs, in looking back upon 
that acrimonious and weary battle. It was, as before 
hinted, a drawn battle. Neither side abandoned any 
of its positions. Neither party gained any perceptible 
advantage upon the other. At least, whatever ad- 
vantage there was went into the general advance of 
human thought, and furnished material to be worked 
up in other forms. 

One thing survived. The indomitable and perti- 
nacious temper of the attack will not confess defeat, 
and rallies fresh after each encounter. To what shall 
we ascribe the obstinate vitality of this insurgent 
temper? How shall we explain this indefatigable 
assault upon all that was honorable and of good report 
in conventional English piety ? We see a small and 
despised group of men, none of them very learned 
or wise or able, who for some reason are willing to 
stand out, for some small shred of truth, against all 
the respectability and most of the learning of their 
time. It is easy enough to disparage their work and 
the men who did it. They may have been driven by 
a spirit of restless vanity and mere adventure, like 
Toland ; or by an irregular literary ambition, like 
Tindal ; or by some feeling of human pity, like Wol- 
laston. They may have been heady and crackbrained 
theorists, like Woolston ; or rancorous polemics, like 
Annet ; or crude and ignorant dogmatists, like Chubb. 



184 ENGLISH RATIONALISM. 

Truly, these are neither the names nor the men whom 
mankind delights to honor. 

All the more, there is something in the mere perti- 
nacity of their warfare to command our respect. The 
warfare is often sterile and pitiful in the petty points 
it raises. These points may be and often are crudely 
and blunderingly put. We wonder, sometimes, at 
the contrast between the mean ability of the com- 
batants and the loud noise they made. But one other 
thing is stiU. better deserving of our notice. It is, 
that men no more distinguished in learning, temper, 
and understanding than the Enghsh Deists, — men 
so little esteemed in their own day, and by common 
reckoning so contemptible ever since, — were yet found 
worthy, by the mere hardihood of their loyalty to 
their poor fragment of truth, to furnish one indispen- 
sable link in the widening tissue which that age was 
weaving in the religious evolution. 



VIII. 
INFIDELITY IN FEANCK 

INFIDEL is a term not of intellectual difference, 
but of moral reproach. It is, especially, a term of 
theological hate. It is often used, wrongly, to imply 
simple unbelief, or even difference in belief Eightly 
used, it means either enemy of the faith, or traitor to 
the faith. And it is chiefly in this last sense that I 
shall take it now. 

That infidelity, of one sort or another, was the 
source of the great catastrophe which befell France a 
century ago, is one of the commonplaces of the his- 
torian. Perhaps it has never been illustrated more 
vividly than by Carlyle in his " French Eevolution." 
In a certain way, too, everybody is agreed upon the 
symptoms of it, and agreed in associating it with the 
general national decline. Political honor and social 
morals were quite as thoroughly diseased as religious 
faith. Such symptoms always go together. When 
general virtue is decayed, when men have lost confi- 
dence in one another, when there is a blunted sense 
of what makes the real welfare of a people, or a hard- 
ness of heart that does not care for it, — which are 
everywhere and always the painful signs of social 
degradation, — there will also be a loss of faith in 
what we may call Eternal Justice and the Universal 
Life. To the minds of men at such a time God is, so 



186 INFIDELITY IN FRANCE. 

to speak, dead. And of all calamities that can hap- 
pen to a man or a people this is to be reckoned the 
worst. As it proved then, it opens the way to every 
other calamity. 

In a general way, this has always been connected 
with the moral corruption of the Church in France 
during the eighteenth century. The names of Cardinal 
Dubois, early in the century, and of Bishop Talley- 
rand, at its close, are understood to represent that 
state of things spiritual, which was assailed by the 
galling criticism of such men as Voltaire and Diderot. 
By a monstrous misuse of terms, these last have been 
called " the infidels " of their period, as if there were 
no other ; and have been made to bear the odium of 
its religious decay. But the root of the disease was 
in the Church itself It was ecclesiasticism divorced 
from humanity that led the way to all the rest. And 
for this we need not look beyond the French Church, 
as distinct from the Catholic world at large. Voltaire 
is usually represented as a mocker, an unbeliever in 
anything holy, at best as a briUiant man of letters. 
But when he was received in that wonderful popular 
ovation in Paris, a little before his death, the withered 
old man of eighty-four was pointed out to the crowd 
as the same generous enthusiast who once saved the 
family of Calas, — a Protestant, whose death was a 
frightful judicial murder, the most conspicuous crime 
of the French priesthood in that century. It was 
such crimes as these, such attacks and defences as 
these, that created what we call the era of Infidelity 
in France. 

The disease was long ripening, and for some even 



REVOCATION OF THE EDICT OF NANTES. 187 

of its later symptoms we must go a great way back. 
It would be convenient to take for our starting-place 
that most cruel act of despotic authority, the Eevo- 
cation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685. This date 
alone is very significant. Only three years before, 
Louis XIV. had won the co-operation of his clergy in 
asserting what are called the " Gallican Liberties," * 
which virtually gave him just such a national Church 
as Henry VIII. had sought to establish in England, 
— independent of Eome, a political tool of the Sov- 
ereign, and at the same time savagely tenacious of its 
Catholic Orthodoxy. We might suspect, if we did 
not know, that this immense concession to royal power 
was the pledge of alliance to some evil end. It was 
so. The Gallican Liberties were the purchase-money 
of religious persecution. And the first act of that 
alliance of crown and mitre was to repudiate what 
little was left of the policy of toleration solemnly 
adopted in the religious peace of 1598. 

But we must go still a few steps farther back. The 
Edict of Nantes -|- had granted to the Protestants cer- 
tain local liberties and powers, which their political 
chiefs seem to have abused, so as to threaten secession 
from the Kingdom and an independent Protestant 
Eepublic. Thirty years later (1628), this ill-conceived 

* These liberties were registered in the famous Four Articles, 
which were substantially these : 1. The abolition of the Pope's 
temporal power in France ; 2. That the Council is of authority su- 
perior to the Pope ; 3. That ancient usage shall not be infringed 
(a very elastic article) ; 4. That the Pope's decision is subject to 
ratification by the Church. Virtually, however, these liberties did 
not outlast the lifetime of their founders. 

+ This was at best, says Lanfrey, ' ' a derisory compact between 
the strong and Aveak, to be interpreted by the strong. " 



188 INFIDELITY IN FEANCE. 

political dream was dispelled by the capture of La 
Eochelle, the Huguenot capital by the sea* The 
local liberties were destroyed, but Eichelieu honorably 
protected the freedom of Protestant worship. While 
those restless nobles, the Eohans and Condes, speedily 
forsook the cause of their fellow-religionists, and 
ranked among their persecuting enemies, the main 
body of the Huguenots became the pious, peaceful, 
non-resistant, industrious, middle-class population best 
known by that name in later history. Their modest 
prosperity stirred the greed of their Catholic neigh- 
bors, and their harmless privileges kept up the rank- 
ling jealousy of the Church authorities; for the 
Church was fast bound by interest and tradition to 
the policy of an all-engrossing centralism, which 
made it the natural ally of a despotic Court. 

The Protestants were shielded in part by the inter- 
ests of the State, represented by such financiers as 
Colbert, who managed to persuade the king that he 
could not afford to ruin these peaceable, convenient, 
and profitable subjects of taxation. It was to break 
down this shield that the effort of the Church was 
now turned. 

The king's treasury, what with his wars and his 
dissipations, was always hungry. The most conve- 
nient source of supply, at particular times of need, 
was the treasury of the Church. Once in five years 

* It is said that when this city had, in 1621, to signify its loy- 
alty, chosen the motto "pro christo et rege " for the public 
seal, an engraver, to gratify the more zealous of that party, inserted 
a G in very faint lines, so as to read " grege " to the instructed eye : 
not Christ and tlie King, but Christ and his Flock. (See Disraeli's 
Charles I.) 



THE COUET AiTD THE CHURCH. 189 

an ecclesiastical convention was held, and at these 
times the royal messenger would present himself, to 
solicit voluntary gifts from the representatives of the 
Church. It will be interesting to listen a moment to 
his high-flown and complimentary harangue. It is 
in 1660, and the clergy have made complaint of cer- 
tain privileges granted to the Protestants three years 
before. The king, he claims, ought not to be bound 
by conditions in receiving what is his by right. 

" Stni," he adds, " the conditions you have annexed 
have not checked his Majesty's good- will. He grants them 
liberally, and in anticipation of your gift. The vapors 
raised in his mind by this httle heat [of the dispute] have 
but caused a dew, which has congealed in a gentle shower 
of decrees and declarations, which I bring you as tokens 
of his regard. . . . Here are the letters which revoke the 
grant of 1657. In a word, I bring you all you have de- 
manded." 

The purchase-money of this concession was two 
million livres. Again, five years later : — 

" My lords (Messeigneurs), on entering this hall I felt, 
from the splendor of your presence and the purple of your 
robes, the effect of those rays of the rising Aurora upon 
the Egyptian statue of her son, which each morning she 
touched with life and moved to melody. . . . The reser- 
voirs of the king are void and dry. It is for you, my lords, 
to consider the rank of him who asks, and the justice of 
his demand." 

The clergy reply with very severe conditions, 
especially the exclusion of Protestants from certain 
posts of education and law. These the king yields 



190 INFIDELITY IN FRANCE. 

at the price of four millions. Again (after some 
prefatory phrases), in 1670 : — 

" The overwhelming splendor of this celestial consteUa- 
tion dazzles me, and makes me for the moment incapable 
of speech, but for the friendly aspect of our sovereign Sun, 
which invigorates my vision by the assurance that I rep- 
resent his will. ... By the sovereign Sun, I mean our 
incomparable monarch of France ; and this title I think 
belongs to him of right, not only as the first luminary of 
France but of the entire world ; before whose glittering 
rays the brightest lights of other monarchies feel their 
shining beams grow dim." 

This means money, and a great deal of it, for which 
" the king will deal with them royally." But ofience 
has been given by some relaxing of persecution, and 
a long list of conditions, signed in blank beforehand, 
brings into the royal treasury not much more than 
two millions. Twenty years later, when bigotry had 
done its perfect work, this was increased to the then 
" enormous " figure of twelve millions. 

Five years before the final act of Eevocation, the 
king had so far conceded to the Church as to au- 
thorize the " dragooning " of his subjects into piety. 
What this horrible word means in its literal and hap- 
pily almost forgotten sense, let us try imperfectly to 
understand. 

"It was in this year 1680 that Marillac invented the 
dragonnade. The soldier lends his hand to the priest ; 
the dragoon turns missionary ; all goes now by tap of 
drum. This is the way of proceeding of these soldiers in 
cassocks, these mounted priests, these extemporized preach- 
ers for the glory of the Lord ! Their sermon is composed 



THE DEAGONNADES. 191 

in several heads. First head : a company and a half of 
cavalry is quartered on a family, and the household is 
ruined within a week. Second head : as this does not 
suffice for its conversion, they try severer measures {ques- 
tion extraordinaire *) ; the dragoons beat the men, abuse 
the women, and drag them to the church-doors by the 
hair of their heads. Thirdly : if this does not succeed, 
they burn the feet or hands of the sufferers with slow fire, 
— an invention of their own, or rather a reminiscence of 
the Inquisition : this is thirdly and lastly. Yet not all ; 
for, as the soldier is naturally gay, he wUl vary the pro- 
gramme with jests and entertainments of his fancy. De- 
tachments are set about the Huguenot, to keep him from 
sleeping for days together. They pinch, prick, and pull, 
tUl the poor wretch yields to the long torture, and sells 
his faith for a little slumber. They do it all with a clear 
conscience : they have their dispensations. And have they 
not the approval of the court ladies % ' The dragoons make 
the best of missionaries,' says Madame de Sevigne, who has 
looked into the matter. What need of more *? " t 

Such poor privileges as were left, under this atro- 
cious system, were taken away by the " Eevocation " 
of Oct. 15, 1685. Even this, while forbidding the 
public exercise of worship, permitted the Protestants 
"to remain in the kingdom without liability to be 
troubled on account of their religion." But a month 
later — on a complaint that this proviso might check 
conversions — came a proclamation removing this 
last frail defence ; and then " the persecution began !" 
There are degrees in estimating the horrors that en- 

* A technical term of judicial torture. 

t The above illustrations, with several which follow, are taken 
from Lanfrey's L'Eglise et les PhUosui^hes au Dix-huitUme Siecle. 



192 INFIDELITY IN FRANCE. 

sued, as we compute the number of exiles at less or 
more. The accounts vary by some half a million. 
But the nature of the act, with the detestable bargain- 
ing and chaffering that led to it, we have seen plainly 
enough already. 

It is not the mere act of persecution that makes 
the chief horror of this thing. It is the debauching 
of the ecclesiastical conscience : Bossuet, who holds 
mixed marriages a sacrilege, to be broken off at all 
cost, palters with the king's flagrant vices, saying, 
" I do not demand. Sire, that you quench in a mo- 
ment so hot a flame, — that would be impossible ; but 
at least, Sire, endeavor to check it by degrees." It is 
the enslaving of a noble nature to be a tool of cru- 
elty and injustice : Fenelon, who would fain try the 
way of persuasion only, must propitiate the Court, 
and writes : " There are hardly any of the Eeligion 
left in Rochelle, since I offer rewards to the inform- 
ers. ... I am putting the men in prison, women 
and children in convents, by authority of the bishop." 
And again, a few months later, "I think the king's 
authority ought not to relax at all." It is the dead- 
ening of common charity and mercy : Madame de 
Sevigne, the loveliest woman of her time, ravished 
with joy that the king has led her out to dance one 
day, says of the Eevocation, " Nothing is so noble as 
that Act ; no king has done or will do anything so 
memorable ! " It is the stifling of every generous 
sense of justice : Arnauld, who knows what perse- 
cution is, thinks, perhaps, to ward off the reproach of 
a Protestant leaning of his own when he says, " These 
ways are something rude, but not at all unjust." 



THE REGENCY. 193 

These four names represent to us all that is ablest, 
noblest, fairest, boldest, in the great age of the French 
monarchy. " If they have done these things in the 
green tree, what will they do in the dry ? " 

So far, the Church of France may plead, perhaps, 
that though her acts may have been mistaken, yet at 
least they were sincere. But very early in the fol- 
lowing century that poor plea comes to naught. Mas- 
sillon, one of the few court preachers whose tone 
really touches the conscience, was also the last of 
the great French ecclesiastics who can be said to 
have retained his faith. His hand had helped to con- 
secrate that paragon of hypocrisy and craft, the Abbe 
Dubois, whose strange intrigues to buy a cardinal's 
hat make the comedy of this age of the Church, as 
the persecuting acts make its tragedy.* 

The flaunting infidelity of the Orleans Eegency 
(1715-1723), of which Dubois may be taken as the 
type in things spiritual, at least gave a little respite 
to the rigor of ecclesiastical law. It gave, too, the 
opportunity for those two keen strokes of satire aimed 
at the reign of Hypocrisy, — Voltaire's " OEdipus " 

* At the table of George IV., when Prince of Wales, the conver- 
sation once turned upon the question, Who was the wickedest man 
in history ? Eev. Sydney Smith, being present, gave his voice for 
the Regent Orleans, adding a little awkwardly, "and he was a 
prince." The Prince, with ready tact, replied, "I should give the 
preference to his tutor;" adding, "and, Mr. Sydney, he was a 
clergyman." (Fitzgerald's Life of George IV.) Dubois, said the 
Duke St. Simon, ' ' exuded mendacity at every pore. " " You could 
see the falsehood in his eyes, as in those of a young fox, " said the 
mother of the Regent. She could not pardon the levity with which 
Dubois had treated the early vices of his royal pupil. {Nouvelle 
Biographie Ginirali). 

13 



194 INFIDELITY IN FRANCE. 

(1718), which attacks an official priesthood in a few 
vigorous lines by the offended Queen ; and Mon- 
tesquieu's "Persian Letters" (1721), which make a 
piece of irony upon French society of the period, 
from a man-of-the-world's point of view, as smooth 
and effective as Pascal's Provincialcs against the 
Jesuits from the point of view of a moralist. 

But religious liberty had nothing to hope at such a 
time and from such a source. The infamies of the 
Eegency were immediately followed (1724) by a sharp 
turn of persecution against the Protestants. " On the 
mere deposition of a priest, their pastors were put to 
death, their dead dragged upon the hurdle, their dis- 
ciples chained in galleys, their women shaven, beaten 
with rods, cast into prisons, or into wet dungeons," 
whence, long years after, a few of them were deliv- 
ered, insane with griefs and miseries. These horrors 
were perpetrated in an age which had forgotten even 
the decencies of the profession of Christian belief. 
It is impossible to suspect the men guilty of such 
things of being moved to them by either of those 
chief pretexts of persecuting cruelty, faith or fear. 

A few years later (1730) the edict of intolerance * 
was revived against the Jansenists. But this, instead 
of opening directly a new period of persecution, led 
the way to a strange outbreak of fanaticism, which 
lasted in various shapes for more than thirty years, 
and may be regarded as the expiring effort of the so 
greatly degraded ecclesiastical faith of France. Two 

* Contained in the Bull ( Unigenit^is) of Pope Clement XI., in 
1713, condemning in the lump one hundred and one maxims of 
Jansenist piety. 



WORSHIP OF THE SACKED HEART. 195 

forms of it, in particular, are associated with the two 
rival religious parties. The " Worship of the Sacred 
Heart" belongs to the story of the Jesuits. The 
"Convulsions," with the atrocious cruelties that fol- 
lowed, and make the last worst chapter in that long 
story of intolerance, are the special stigma of the 
Jansenists. 

The " Sacred Heart " — a sort of grotesque parody of 
Mediseval realism — is a symbol, to be taken in its 
most gross, literal, and bloody sense, revealed (1688) 
in the disordered dreams of a sickly, ignorant, and 
half-witted girl, Maria Alacoque. It figures a literal 
exchange of hearts between the devotee and Jesus, 
who plucks his own, bleeding, from his bosom, — an 
ignoble travesty of the words, " My child, give me 
thy heart." It signifies the religion of mere senti- 
ment, in its most morbid and debased condition. 
The phrase by which it asserts itself is that " Love — 
mere love — is the object, the motive, and the end." 
We easily see what debauching of the intellect, what 
enslaving of the will, is sure to follow from this 
exaggerating of the blind emotion. The worship of 
the Sacred Heart, assiduously nursed by the bigotry 
which so easily finds its opportunity, was consecrated 
at length by papal edict (1765), and became a type 
of those debasing forms of sentimental piety out of 
which modern Eomanism has sought, in France es- 
pecially, to made a religion for the ignorant, pro- 
tected by fanatical stupidity against all assaults of 
reason, and all invasions of a sense of right. 

The Jansenist party had long outlived the heroic 
memories of Port Eoyal. Their shield from persecu- 



196 INFIDELITY IN FRANCE. 

tion now was made up of inordinate fanaticism with- 
in, and a hard cruelty without. In 1727, when they 
were threatened with new severities, it chanced that 
one of their popular saints, the Abb^ Paris, died and 
was buried. A crippled beggar bethought him soon 
after of finding a remedy by lying upon the tomb- 
stone of the holy man, which he did daily, to the 
jest, scandal, or admiration of the gathered crowd. 
The healing did not come to pass ; but in the course 
of some weeks came nervous convulsions, real or 
assumed, which daily more and more stirred the mul- 
titude as something miraculous ; and, in a tempest of 
popular frenzy, it was given out that the shrunken 
limb had begun visibly to lengthen, — a report duly 
chronicled and improved upon from day to day. 

This was the beginning of what makes a very hu- 
miliating but only too familiar chapter in the history 
of superstition, the story of the Commlsionnaircs, with 
a long array of astounding miracles, duly vouched and 
verified.* How long it lasted, and just what shapes 
it took, we cannot teU. Its most extraordinary exhi- 
bition was in a scene which took place on Good 
Friday of 1759, and was recorded in detail by duly 
accredited witnesses : the crucifixion of Sister Frances. 
This poor girl lay in a sort of trance, having kissed 
the crucifix, and touched the relics of the holy Paris. 
After she had been scourged with some sixty blows, 
on back and breast, and laid out flat upon a light 
wooden cross, and her hands — which had been 
pierced in the same way about six months before — 

* Five of the most signal of these were afterwards jiidieially 
investigated and condemned. 



THE CON VULSIONN AIRES. 197 

had been wet with a rag steeped in holy water, this 
is a part of what followed : — 

" Having wiped the hand the director proceeded, with 
four or five blows of a hammer, to drive a square iron nail, 
nearly three inches long, through the middle of the palm 
of the left hand, till it entered several lines into the wood, 
as I afterwards verified. After an interval of two minutes, 
the same priest nailed the right hand in the same way. 
She appeared to suffer much, but without sigh or groan, 
only her face showed signs of pain. This was at seven 
o'clock. At half-past seven her feet were nailed to the 
foot-rest with square nails over three inches long. A 
quarter of an hour later, the head of the cross was raised 
three or four feet ; and after half an hour the other end 
was raised in like manner. At half-past eight the cross 
was lowered, then raised again, and the points of naked 
swords were set to her breast. At ten she was laid down 
again, and the nails drawn out with pincers, when she 
ground her teeth with pain ; but previously the right side 
Avas laid bare, and pierced with a spear. She asked for 
drink, and was given a mixture of vinegar and ashes." 

Such performances might move the pity, but must 
certainly deepen the contempt, of those mocking 
philosophers who were now the only champions of 
Eeason in France. After all, an age must have such 
prophets and apostles as it can get. Most likely 
they will be as good as it deserves, and, possibly, the 
best fitted to its needs. The sharpest weapon to be 
lifted against that system of cruelty and unreason 
which now bore sway in the name of Eeligion, was 
the weapon of contempt. In that warfare our sym- 
pathy goes with him who is daring enough to strike 



198 INFIDELITY IN FRANCE. 

the blow. If he is not quite such a man as we should 
have chosen, or quite such a man as we can honor, it 
is a fair question how such a man was likely to exist, 
out of prison, in such a state of things. At any rate, 
something had to be done, unless the whole fabric of 
morals and free intelligence was to rot away inwardly. 
Voltaire and Diderot might possibly do a better work 
than better men. At need, God can make the mock- 
ery as well as the wrath of man to serve him. 

The first open protest of reason against the popular 
superstition is generally regarded as having been 
Bayle's treatise on the Comet (1682), — this erratic 
visitant being then first distinctly registered in the 
system of unvarying celestial law, not as a miracu- 
lous token of Divine wrath. This was a declaration 
of hostilities against the existing religious order ; and 
Bayle had to live as a fugitive in the free States of 
Holland, — a hero of letters, too, in his way, — toil- 
ing meanwhile at the enormous task of his " Diction- 
ary " (1696-1702). When this came out, " so great 
was the avidity to have sight of it, that long before 
the doors of the Mazarin library were open, a little 
crowd assembled in the early morning of each day, 
and there was as great a struggle for the first access 
to the precious book as for the front row at the per- 
formance of a piece for which there is a rage." * Even 
the learning accumulated in the numberless encyclo- 
paedias of our day still leaves space for the curious 
scholar, now and then, to search this audacious and 
amazing treasure-house of old-fashioned erudition, in 
which every item is (so to speak) pointed and barbed, 
* Morley's Voltaire, p. 273. 



BAYLE. — THE ENCYCLOPEDISTS. 199 

— less a mere vehicle of information than a dart to 
sting old prejudice. 

Towards the middle of the century, contemporary 
with the strange revival of piety just spoken of, there 
is a distinct attempt to methodize and popularize the 
new intelligence. Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws," 
(1748) is a comparative study of institutions, wide if 
not very deep, holding up the spectacle of Constitu- 
tional liberties in England over against that "slow 
strangling of French civilization" which was going 
on under a corrupt and stolid despotism. But the 
great work in this direction was the " Encyclopaedia " 
of Diderot and D'Alembert (1751-1765). This, pre- 
pared as it was under the jealous restrictions of 
authority, is not that complete circle of learning 
and science which we now understand by the term, 
but rather an immense number of separate essays, 
arranged alphabetically, including what for that time 
was a truly wonderful variety of information on all 
sorts of topics, digested with extraordinary industry 
by the compilers.* It was different from Bayle's 
great achievement, in addressing not scholars but the 
mass of men ; and lively anecdotes of the period tell 
of the mark it made, when science and learning were 
thus brought down among the affairs of daily life. 
Especially it was felt — as its authors meant it should 
be — that here was a ponderous and very effective 
artillery against that mental tyranny, built on popular 
ignorance, which made the strength of the corrupted 

* Carlyle's article on Diderot shows this aspect of it very well. 
Morley's "Diderot" (2 vols.), as well as his "Voltaire," is, how- 
ever, a far more just and valuable study than Carlyle's. 



200 INFIDELITY IN FRANCE. 

Church. The name " Encyclopedists " speedily came 
to stand for all that was most daring and radical in 
the assault. 

We have nothing, however, to do directly with this, 
except so far as it was one symptom in a time of 
intellectual revolt, one act in the long and most labo- 
rious process of popular enlightenment. In a general 
way it may be true that growing enlightenment in 
the common mind is the surest cure of superstition, 
and the only thing on which religious freedom ulti- 
mately can rest. But the process never goes on 
smoothly. Old interests and old prejudices are there, 
for it to chafe against ; and when the course of things 
begins to threaten seriously, these will rally, and 
strike back sliarp blows. 

Intolerance was not dead. The most active agents 
of it, the Jesuits, were, it is true, getting out of favor. 
They had made themselves, in one way and another, 
odious to the authorities, so that about this time 
(1764) we find their establishments broken up in 
France, and a few years later (1773) the Order itself 
was dissolved by sentence of the Pope.* It was the 
Jansenists who now found themselves in the place of 
authority and responsibility. Something in the logic 
of persecution had charms, it would seem, for the 
legal mind ; and the " Parliament of Paris," the High 
Court of the kingdom, was under Jansenist control. 
It might be thought fit to set an example of new 
religious zeal, over against the old charge of heresy. 
It might be that the fanaticism of the Convulsionnaires 

* Clement XIV., who signed the sentence with a heavy heart, 
and, by a marvellous judgment, died the next year ! 



GALAS. 201 

really reflected a sincere bigotry in the higher orders. 
At any rate, it is the Jansenist party, and no longer 
the Jesuit, that is held responsible for the tragedy 
which now ensues. 

It happened, late in the year 1761, that John Galas, 
a Protestant tradesman of Toulouse, a man of sixty- 
four, and father of a grown-up family, was arrested 
on the charge of murdering his eldest son. The son, 
a man of morose and moody temper, and ill content 
with the sphere in life he was likely to fill, hung 
himself at night in his father's shop. The family, in 
an evil hour, protested that it was not suicide, which 
was then regarded as if the worst of crimes. The 
only alternative was murder ; and the report spread 
that the young man was just going to turn Catholic, 
and was murdered by his family to prevent it. Evi- 
dence there was none, and the defence was perfect ; 
yet there have not been wanting, even in our time, 
apologists for the charge. An example must be had 
to strike terror to the unbelieving heart, and Galas 
was made the victim ; put through the form of trial ; 
then tortured, and broken on the wheel, — a brutal 
and horrid mode of punishment, in which the wretch 
(unless sooner despatched by strangling or the " stroke 
of grace ") might be made to writhe all day under 
the blows of the executioner, who, turning the wheel 
slowly, broke his bones one by one.* 

* As an illustration of the horror inspired by this barbarity, see 
the historical instance of the execution of the young Count Horn in 
1720, by act of Dubois, in the very interesting (fictitious) Me- 
moires de la Marquise de Oriquy (Paris, 10 vols.). Some curious 
details on this subject are given in Professor Frederic Huidekoper's 
" Indirect Testimony," p. 210. 



202 INFIDELITY IN FKANCE. 

A little later (1765), a wayside crucifix near Abbe- 
ville was found to have been mutilated during the 
night. There was no one to suspect ; but two boys 
of eighteen or twenty had given offence by singing 
rude songs ; by omitting to show respect to some 
religious procession ; by — who knows what ? They 
were accordingly charged with the sacrilege, and 
hunted for arrest. One succeeded in escaping out of 
France. The other, one La Barre, was seized, and for 
his suspected crime condemned to have his hand 
struck off, his tongue torn out, and then to be burned 
aUve. By special mercy he was beheaded before 
burning. Such atrocities must be remembered, in 
thinking of the horrors of the Eevolution. The 
execution of La Barre was less than twenty-four 
years before the taking of the Bastile. Those fero- 
cious crowds were used to the sight of just such 
things as these. 

We have come now to the culminating acts which 
called forth the tempest of wrath that never stayed 
till the day of full expiation came. From this time 
forth, the system which could be guilty of it is known 
as " the Accursed Thing " {Vlnfdme) among those who 
took upon themselves the task of assailing and crush- 
ing it. Hitherto their method had been an intellect- 
ual protest, and its sharpest weapon was mockery. 
Henceforth it is to be moral wrath, hot and unspar- 
ing ; and its weapon is hate. The wretched family of 
Galas, after suffering torture and imprisonment, were 
sheltered, maintained, and energetically defended by 
Voltaire, now an old man of near seventy. For three 
years his efforts for them were unceasing, till he com- 



VOLTAIRE. 203 

pelled the sentence to be reversed and their confiscated 
estate restored. 

Eor these three years, he said, he should have 
thought himself guilty if he had allowed himself to 
smile. "This is no longer a time for jesting," he 
wrote. " Is this the home of philosophy and delight ? 
Nay, rather, it is the land of the St. Bartholomew. 
The Inquisition would not dare to do what these Jan- 
senist judges have done." D'Alembert writes bitterly 
that they must make the best of the situation, mock- 
ing at what could not be helped. " What ! " replied 
Voltaire, " you would be content to laugh ? We ought 
rather to resolve on vengeance ; at any rate, to leave 
a country where day by day such horrors are commit- 
ted. . . . No, once more I cannot bear that you should 
finish your letter by saying you mean to laugh. Is 
this a time for laughing ? Did men laugh when they 
saw the bull of Phalaris heating red hot ? " 

Voltaire (1694-1778) was no martyr, and never 
meant to be. He was not of the stuff that martyrs 
are made of. He was, on the contrary, the shiftiest 
of mortals, the very type of that " wise man " of the 
Book of Proverbs, who " seeeth the evil and hideth 
himself." He never hesitated, at need, to make pro- 
fession of Catholic orthodoxy, or to go through the 
forms of Catholic piety. To the last, he could on 
an emergency lie with an enticing simplicity and 
directness that might deceive the very elect, and 
did deceive his best friends. He paid assiduous court 
to the king's mistresses, and diligently made friends 
of the popes and bishops of unrighteousness. Once, 
it is said, Madame Pompadour proposed, for better 



204 INFIDELITY IN FRANCE. 

security, that he should be made a cardinal ! His 
scruple drew the line at that. 

But his flights — into England, into Prussia, into 
Switzerland — were bits of strategy in a long cam- 
paign ; and from each he came back armed with new 
weapons to fight the adversary. His retreat in the 
superb situation at Ferney, — which takes in the 
magnificent landscape like a map, from Jura to Mont- 
Blanc, where he gathered an industrious and thriving 
village, in which his bust now adorns the public foun- 
tain as that of a questionable patron saint, and where 
the stone chapel still stands, hard by his garden gate, 
with the inscription Deo erexit Voltaire, — ■ was at once 
a sort of castle or garrison to carry on the fight, 
and a refuge for many a miserable exile flying from 
oppression. And, whatever we think of his shrewd- 
ness and thrift, as the one man of letters in that time 
who in the midst of so much misery kept a clear eye 
to his own interest, and steadily improved upon the 
fortune he inherited,* and never lost his faith that 
money was worth more than most of the things men 
lose it for, — he keeps at least this title to our respect, 
that his rare fortune was the means of a still rarer 
generosity. 

The faults of Voltaire are familiarly enough known : 
his implacable mockery, which spared nothing human 
or divine ; his looseness of living, which recognized 
no standard of morals, and of writing, which knew 
no law of decency ; the void of all heroic traits in 
his character, except that single one, of an inextin- 

* His income the yeai' before his death, Mr. Parton estimates, 
was equivalent to $200,000 now. 



VOLTAIKE. 205 

guishable moral wrath at hypocrisy and inhumanity ; 
with the absolute disbelief in the nobler qualities 
which belong to the religious life. But he was never 
guilty of cruelty, treachery, debauchery, or wanton 
vice. What . we rightly enough call — and what he 
himseK perhaps would glory in calling — his "infi- 
delity," was strictly a reflex of the official Christian- 
ity of his age. No mockery of his could do it such 
deadly mischief as the long game of bribery and 
intrigue by which Abbe Dubois had gained his ec- 
clesiastical preferment. No attack he could make 
so struck at the heart of Christianity as its absolute 
divorce, in judicial hands, from common charity and 
mercy as well as justice. No immorality he was 
guilty of matches the iniquity of that state of things 
he attacked, in which the counsel gravely given by 
the Eegent to a young candidate for "holy orders" 
was virtually this : " It is not safe to live openly in 
adultery for a simple priest; wait till you are a 
bishop ! " 

In short, it was the official religion — it was not 
what we understand by Christianity — which made 
the object of Voltaire's implacable attack. It was this 
— not (as has been libellously said) the memory of 
Christ, the Son of Man — that he meant in his famous 
phrase, ^crasez Vlnfdme, which we should best ren- 
der, " Down with the Accursed Thing ! " It is unfor- 
tunately true that the name of Christianity was still 
so far identified with the law of morahty that, in 
assailing the one, Voltaire and his associates also 
defied the other ; that their revolt against the system 
included revolt against the Ten Commandments, 



206 INFIDELITY IN FRANCE. 

especially the Seventh. Along with the austerities 
of early Christianity, they hated and despised such 
poor shreds of its morality as were left. But the 
official Church of France had kept no terms with 
Eeason, and left no door open by which it could 
enter. Christianity — so far as that could do it — 
was forbidden to widen out into a religion of hu- 
manity and justice. There could be no compromise, 
no gradual evolution from one into the other, such as 
took place in Protestant countries. And so this great 
calamity befell, — that Eeason, distorted and dwarfed, 
could only speak through the lips of the sworn 
enemies of Eeligion. 

Just then, the words humanity and justice, and the 
thing which these names represent, made the particu- 
lar need of the religion of the time. These words 
had, for want of better, to be spoken in the way of 
defiance and with sharp emphasis by Voltaire and 
those of his school. He has been called " an impas- 
sioned Bayle." But we see at once the weakness 
and limitation of any word, even the most needed, 
spoken so in mockery and hate. It is at best a neg- 
ative word, a protest, provisional and preparatory. 
The gospel of the time, such as it was, must find for 
itself a positive expression, such as it could. What 
Voltaire had spoken in anathema, for the destruc- 
tion of inhumanity and unreason, must be said in 
another tone, constructively, by Eousseau, and thus 
become the popular manifesto of a positive, a revo- 
lutionary faith. 

Eousseau (1712-1778) belongs to a younger gene- 
ration than Voltaire : and there was radical alienation 



ROUSSEAU. 207 

between tliem, though their later years ran smoothly 
enough together, and their deaths, only a few weeks 
apart, linked them still more closely in the common 
memory. The vices and scandals of Rousseau's life 
offend us a good deal more than those of Voltaire ; 
and the morbid and irritable jealousy at a more 
shining literary name, which he took no pains to 
disguise, is an unpleasant contrast to the gay and 
brisk wit that makes us half pardon the sins of the 
great scoffer. But there came a time when all hearts 
seemed to open suddenly to his influence, and even 
his inordinate claim was satisfied by finding himself 
the chief literary power in France. 

His fame as the great Sentimentalist of his age, 
and as the precursor of a School of Sentiment which 
has hardly expired in our day, does not concern us 
now. A better merit is claimed for him, that he was 
the first to develop, in his " jfimile," the rational and 
humane method of children's education which is so 
thoroughly adopted in our best school-systems now. 
But what gives his name its real significance for us is 
that he set forth, with genuine conviction and with 
immense popular effect, the two main articles of the 
Revolutionary Creed. These may be said to have 
inspired whatever was living and true in the great 
popular revolt which came afterwards to take so 
bloody a shape. Still more, purified by the dreadful 
winnowing of the Revolution, they prove to be fun- 
damental and essential truths, which the Christianity 
of a later day must recognize or perish. 

These two articles of faith are, one religious and 
one political. They are laid down, respectively, in 



208 INFIDELITY IN FKANCE. 

the "Confessions of a Savoyard Vicar," and in the 
" Social Contract." 

In the first of these, Eeligion is represented in the 
form of a natural piety, a religion purely of senti- 
ment, which allies itself easily enough with ecclesi- 
astical forms, and is content to let people keep and 
cherish such outward symbol of it as they will. 
The good Vicar, who discourses eloquently on the 
God of Nature among the splendors of a mountain 
sunrise, has been touched with the Eevolutionary idea, 
and has wrestled with doubts ; but he has taken into 
his heart this sweet solvent of a natural piety, and, 
ignoring the creeds, finds more than his old joy in 
ministering to his simple-minded flock. This made 
the gospel of the early Revolutionists, down to Eobes- 
pierre, and his theatrical worship of the ^tre Supreme. 
That it could even be a bloody faith at need, we see 
not merely in the acts of those sanguinary theorists, 
but, in particular, that at one crisis it cut off at a 
blow the whole party of anarchists, — Hebert and the 
rest, — to whom such parade of piety was a mockery 
and an offence. And so they perished as "deniers 
of God and immortality ! " The axe fell faster than 
ever, just when Eousseau's creed received its final 
consecration. 

The theory of the " Social Contract " entered still 
more deeply into Eevolutionary politics, even if it may 
not be said to be, at bottom, the theory of republican 
France to-day. To give it distinct relief, we should 
compare it with one or two earlier expositions some- 
thing of the same cast. According to Hobbes, men 
to whom their natural condition of war has become 



THE SOCIAL CONTEACT. 209 

intolerable agree to surrender their liberty into the 
hands of their chief, who thus becomes the absolute 
authority for their laws, conduct, and belief. The 
common English notion, explained by Locke, is that 
by mutual compact men waive such natural rights as 
would do others harm, keeping the largest measure of 
individual freedom that would be safe. According to 
Eousseau, the " Social Contract " makes society into an 
organic whole, as despotic as the despotism of Hobbes, 
and more popular than the constitutionalism of Locke. 
In short, it is the social ideal, of which the only real- 
ization would appear to be the artificial dead-level and 
the immitigable tyranny of Communism. 

It was the calamity of France and of the world, 
that these two great positive conceptions — natural 
piety as the basis of E-eligion, and natural justice as 
the basis of the State — could not be grafted upon a 
stock still green and vigorous, which had in it the life 
of the Past. The theorists who maintained them 
were perhaps as bigoted and narrow as the upholders 
of the ancient order. At any rate, such ideas were 
for the present revolutionary, not constructive. They 
were a manifesto of defiance to existing authority, a 
declaration of hostilities against Church and State. 

There is no need to go over again the ground of 
that wild, blind conflict ; or to show where the fallacy 
or the defect lay in the new gospel of Sentiment. 
That makes part of the often told story of the time. 
It is the story, too, of all times. The evolution of 
Thought is not the logical and peaceful process 
which our theories are apt to suppose. On the con- 
trary, the new thought has generally to attack the 



210 INFIDELITY IN FRANCE. 

old in its intrenchments. Interest and custom and 
authority do not give way, except under heavy 
blows. What came into the field, modestly enough, 
as a simple challenge to fair debate soon shows 
itself as deadly defiance, to be determined by that 
war of passion and brute force which we call the 
Eevolution. 

But we must look for a moment at one or two 
political results, which show by how wide spaces the 
Christian history of our century is separated from 
that which went before. 

Under a sudden impulse of revolutionary fervor, 
under the direct inspiration (as we may say) of the 
gospel according to Eousseau, on the 4th of August, 
1789, the privileges of Noble and Ecclesiastic were 
voluntarily surrendered. This amazing act of sacri- 
fice upon the Eevolutionary altar left the field clear 
to organize such a religion as the time might demand, 
on such a foundation as the time might accept. The 
clergy of France were compelled to take oath to the 
new Constitution; and such as refused underwent 
the same relentless persecution, or escaped into the 
same bitter exile, that had been the portion of the 
Protestants a hundred years before. So the guilt of 
a former generation was expiated in the suffering of 
one comparatively innocent. And the loyalty, the 
courage, the patience, of the exiles of the eighteenth 
century did something to redeem the memory of the 
oppressors of the seventeenth. 

It proved, besides, that the Christian religion was 
not dead in France. The Revolution itself must by 
its own showing respect the voice of the people ; and 



THE CONCOEDAT. 211 

this voice signified that iniquity in high places had 
not rooted out the popular faith, which still clung to 
altar and ritual. A few years later, when Democracy 
had grown " terrible as an army with banners," and 
its Chief could dictate terms to sovereigns, the new 
Power found it expedient to appeal to that popular 
faith, and plant itself upon the old foundation. On 
Easter week of 1802, the " Concordat," negotiated 
with Pope Pius YII. the preceding year, was pro- 
claimed with ostentatious splendor, and Christianity 
was again declared the national religion. 

But in yielding this Napoleon, in his most imperi- 
ous fashion, exacted two conditions, which made it 
the creation of a new system, not the restoring of the 
old. The Eoman Catholic religion was no longer 
" the religion of France," — as the Pope even abjectly 
and piteously entreated it might be styled, — but 
" the religion of a majority of the French people." 
Political — nay, popular — right was thus substituted 
at a stroke for ecclesiastical or divine right. France 
was " Christian" just as, in a different turn of things, 
it might have been declared Protestant or Mahometan ; 
and such a change of title would have been prevented 
by no scruples of a Bonaparte. Down to this day 
the Eoman Church is sustained by the State on the 
same terms, and by the same endowment in the ratio 
of its numbers, with the Protestants and the Jews. 

The second concession wrung from the reluctant 
Pope was the recognition of the Eevolutionary or 
" Constitutional " clergy. To the loyal exiles, faithful 
to the ancient memories, no draught could have been 
■so bitter. The hate of Catholic against Protestant, 



212 INFIDELITY IN FRANCE. 

the jealousy of Jesuit and Janseuist, were mild be- 
side the flaming and deadly passions of the Revolu- 
tionary period, which had tested their faith. Others, 
by a cowardly yielding to the storm, or by taking 
strange and hasty vows, held, as bishops and pastors, 
the places they had left. And now they must fain 
content themselves with " evangelical poverty," and 
yield as they might to the Pope's exhortations of 
humility and self-abnegation for the cause of Christ 
among his people. A few exceptions were haughtily 
conceded by Napoleon ; but for the majority of the 
exiled clergy the only reward was in the praise (which 
many of them well deserved) that they did obedi- 
ently humble themselves, and submit. No wonder 
the terms of this famous treaty, with the humiliations 
that followed, stirred such wrath and contempt in De 
Maistre, brilliant champion of papal autocracy as he 
was, that his long retreat in St. Petersburg was more 
tolerable to him than a return to Italy or France.* 

Still, the Concordat did open the way to a Catholic 
revival in France, which has been in the main Ultra- 
montane in its drift, and has from time to time held, 
or seemed to hold, the destinies of France in its con- 
trol. Twice it has defeated the Eepublic, and set it 
back; and possibly the terrible crisis of 1870 was 
not the last. It has at least served to do one gi'eat 
mischief, in forcing political freedom into open en- 
mity with religion again in our day. By the exposi- 

* The best account of this affair is in the e.xtended and most 
interesting work of D'Haussonville (8vo, 5 vols.). That of Thei- 
ner (2 vols. ) gives the point of view of a zealous Catholic. Thiers 
has included an excellent chapter on the Concordat in his " Histoiy 
of the Consulate." 



THE EEVOLUTIONARY GOSPEL. 213 

tion of Miclielet, the Eevolution was fundamentally 
and necessarily Antichristian, — liberty as against 
despotism, equality as against privilege. Justice as 
opposed to Grace. 

This view of the conflict is an inheritance from the 
Infidelity of the last century in France. Here, with 
Protestant antecedents, in a republic more than a 
century old, we think no such thing. The doctrine 
of Eousseau went into the American Declaration of 
Independence, and so has given us one article of 
our political faith. But the same thing went into 
the heart of the people, in perfect harmony with the 
Christianity they still believed in ; and through the 
most devout of interpreters — especially Channing 
and his school — it has had its fuU share in shaping 
the liberal gospel of to-day. 



IX. 

THE GEEMAN CEITICS. 

A HISTORY of the course of Biblical Criticism 
would be a task of no small labor, and might 
easily be made the driest of human compositions. 
It would have to begin at least as far back as Ori- 
gen's " Sixfold " collation of texts and versions ; 
and it would have to take a new departure from 
Jerome's correspondence with Augustine, touching 
some points of interpretation in the Latin transla- 
tion he was then completing. 

The names and the times just mentioned give us, 
in fact, the double point of view which must be kept 
in mind in our dealing with the subject. Compari- 
son and revision of the text only prepare the ground 
for the work of interpretation; and, as soon as this 
is once undertaken in a critical spirit, the way is 
open to the later, larger task of historical and scien- 
tific criticism, which makes the proper business of 
biblical scholarship to-day. 

It was essential to the Catholic theory of authority 
that the Bible — assumed to be the ultimate standard 
of religious truth — should be hidden from the com- 
mon mind in a sacred tongue, and subject only to 
official interpretation. This however did not, as is 
sometimes said, prevent its free, familiar, and ex- 
tended use, in popular exhortation and address. 



AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE. 215 

throughout the Middle Age. To judge from the 
incessant citation of it at that time, I do not see 
why the substance of it — whether history, doctrine, 
or religious meditation — may not have been as fa- 
miliar to the popular mind then as now ; allowing, 
of course, for the general slowness of mental move- 
ment in those days. And it is this Mediaeval use of 
the sacred books which the Council of Trent has sanc- 
tioned in defining, as the highest standard of appeal, 
the Latin Vulgate Bible, on the basis of Jerome's 
version, subject to the official interpretation of duly 
appointed ministers of the Church. 

If the end in view were to preserve the Scriptures 
as a recognized standard of authority, and to employ 
that standard only for doctrinal or practical uses, — 
which the common language of religionists seems to 
imply, — then the Catholic method is clearly right. 
It is meant to keep the critical spirit from intruding 
upon the things of faith ; and, within its limits, it 
succeeds in doing so. Bat in the era of the Kefor- 
mation two great blows were struck against this 
smooth and plausible theory. The first was struck 
by Erasmus, who opened the way of modern criti- 
cism by learned comparison of texts. The second 
was struck by Luther, who put the Bible before the 
people in their own tongue ; and so made inevitable 
that search into its true character and meaning which, 
in Germany especially, has been so busily followed 
since. 

The first task of the modern criticism might seem 
simple enough, — to ascertain the true text, as nearly 
as may be, by comparison of manuscripts ; and then to 



2X6 THE GERMAN CRITICS. 

explain it by the better learning, exactly as the Greek 
and Latin classics are explained. But even in the 
time of Erasmus some alarm was raised by finding 
that the Scripture authority for certain fundamental 
doctrines was much weakened by the loss of favorite 
texts, or the doubt thrown on them. Quite early in 
the eighteenth century, long before the question of 
the divine authority of Scripture Nvas seriously raised, 
this alarm went higher, when it was found that by 
diligent search and comparison the number of "va- 
rious readings " had been brought as high as thirty 
thousand. This seemed to show that the Bible had 
not, according to the favorite hypothesis, been mirac- 
ulously kept from change all those centuries as the 
one infallible Word of God. That the alarm was real, 
and was felt by the gravest minds, is shown in the 
following passage, which I copy from John Owen, a 
theologian of that day (1616-1683), whom Coleridge 
praises in particular, as one of the soundest and ablest 
of English divines : — 

" If these hundreds of words were the critical conjec- 
tures and amendments of the Jews, what security have we 
of the mind of God as truly represented to us, seeing that 
it is supposed also that some of the words in the margin 
were sometimes in the line ] And if it be supposed, as it is, 
that there are innumerable other places of the like nature 
standing in need of such amendments, what a door would 
be opened to curious pragmaticall wits to overturn all the 
certainty of the truth of the Scripture, every one may see. 
Give once this liberty to the audacious curiosity of men 
priding themselves in their aHfical ability, and we shaU 
quickly find out what woful state and condition the Truth 



EAELIER CRITICAL EDITIONS. 217 

of the Scripture shall be brought unto. . . . But he that 
pulleth down an hedge, a Serpent shall bite him ! " 

These words set before us very clearly that con- 
dition of the religious mind which the modern move- 
ment of thought has had to meet. The occasion of 
them, it will be noticed, is not that daring specula- 
tion, and not that scientific exposition, with M'hich 
we have become familiar since ; but simply that text- 
ual criticism which is the humblest, but yet a neces- 
sary, task of sacred letters, — the modest preliminary 
task of comparison of copies, and settling minute 
probabilities among the various readings.* This is 
a task whose importance depends almost wholly on 
the theory of verbal inspiration, dear to minds like 
Owen's ; so that, with the dying out of that theory, it 
comes to be little else than the exercise of a sterile 
erudition, or perhaps an idle curiosity. Considering 
the admirable and patient scholarship still spent upon 
it, there is perhaps no other department of mental in- 
dustry of which it may be so truly said, that the value 
of the chase is incomparably more than the value of 
the game. 

The first advances of any note towards a rational- 
izing treatment of the Bible were made by the English 
Deists. Their treatment was very crude and igno- 
rant, if we judge it by the standard of our day ; and 
it was thought, in its own time, to have been suf&- 

* "Walton's "Polyglott," which called forth Owen's plaintive 
remonstrance, was published in 1654-57. The chief steps taken in 
the ensuing century were in Mill's critical edition of the New Tes- 
tament (1707), "Wettstein (1751), and Griesbach (1774-75), whose 
completed work was published in 1796-1806, 



218 THE GEKMAN CRITICS. 

ciently confuted. Common English opinion, as rep- 
resented by Edmund Burke, looked at it with serene 
contempt as a thing dead. But on the Continent it 
was quite otherwise. Voltaire, while in England, had 
taken an eager interest in whatever looked like a 
rational and free exercise of thought on religious 
things. Clarke and Bolingbroke, at the two ends of 
the scale, were perhaps the names that interested him 
most ; but the whole style of thinking included in the 
vague term " deistical " had a great effect on his own 
mind, and, through him, became part of the current 
opinion among the freethinkers of France, — who, 
indeed, took it as an impulse to something much more 
radical. It was also through Voltaire, then the one 
great literary power on the Continent, that Deism 
found its way into Germany, and began to engage the 
attention of the more thoughtful minds there. 

Still, the first movements of criticism in Germany 
were grave and constructive, not revolutionary. They 
were in the direction, so far, merely of intelligent 
interpretation ; not suspicious, as yet, of any funda- 
mental change in theory. The names which repre- 
sent this stage of the process are those of Semler 
and Eichhorn; and of these two we may say that 
Semler represents a more rationalizing, and Eichhorn 
a more erudite, manner of discussion. And it is 
interesting to remark that both took for their point 
of departure the illustration of the Bible given in the 
manners and customs of Oriental life. Each aimed 
at the same thing, — to take the Hebrew race and 
development from its strange isolation, and introduce 
it into the wider family of nations. The criticism of 



LESSING. 219 

the first was more felt upon the Old Testament ; that 
of the other, upon the New. 

The father of modern scientific criticism is held, 
accordingly, to be Semler, whose investigations on 
the Canon were published in 1771. His rationalistic 
temper, singular for that time, was the reaction from 
a period of morbid and gloomy pietism, in which he 
would pass whole days with groans and tears, — 
effectually stanched in the somewhat arid processes 
of his exposition. His work, it wiU be noticed, pre- 
cedes by just ten years the profound movement in 
the German mind set on foot by the Critical Philos- 
ophy of Kant. It was during these ten years that 
the birth of Critidsm, in its modern sense, may be 
said to have taken place. 

But the circumstances of that birth were far more 
dramatic, and had in them far more of human inter- 
est, than the academic lectures of Semler at Halle, 
or of Kant at Konigsberg. That eminent man of 
letters, Lessing (1729-1781) — who seems to have 
been scourged by destiny into taking up, one by one, 
the tasks just then most necessary to the mental 
unfolding of Germany — was now librarian of that 
vast and magnificent collection of books which by a 
sort of caprice had been stored up at Wolfenblittel. 
He had been recognized as the one masterly and for- 
midable critic of his time ; and the eager diligence in 
the devouring of books, which he kept up everywhere 
in a life of painful wandering, made him about equally 
at home in the matter of debate, in whatever direc- 
tion it might turn up. The same curious, easy, and 
minute erudition, from the obscurest sources, which 



220 THE GERMAN CRITICS. 

oozes SO copiously through the argument of his 
"Laocoon," never fails him when he comes to deal 
with the dry out-of-the-way learning of theology. 
Let the moving force come upon him from any quar- 
ter, and he appears on the instant, fully armed and 
equipped, to take his share in the battle, and always 
to give a good deal more than he takes. 

It is not likely that this champion of literary debate 
would have been drawn so deeply into the theological 
discussions of his time, except as a sort of refuge and 
healing from that blow which makes the cruellest 
episode in all literary biography, — the tragic death of 
his wife and child. It is very characteristic of the 
man, that — after the one passionate cry, which may 
be still read as it was " written in a clear firm hand " 
on the faded leaf in his own library at Wolfenblittel 
— the consolation he found was intellectual w^ork in 
his strongest and best vein, impelled by a generous 
motive, striking for mental emancipation and religious 
liberty. For the occasion of this work, it will be 
necessary to look back a little way. 

Early in life, when he had definitely turned his 
back on theology to seek a career of letters, Lessing 
had become very intimate with the Jew Mendelssohn, 
one of the most esteemed philosophers of the day, 
whose personal traits, of gravity, sweetness, and 
moral dignity, are thought to be reflected in what is 
reckoned to be Lessing's masterpiece, " Nathan the 
Wise." The plan of this noble work, the most 
famous and effective argument for toleration in all 
literature, is sketched, in a letter to a friend, a little 
less than seven months after his wife's death ; and in 



LESSING. — EEIMAEUS. 221 

the same year almost all his writings of controversial 
theology were published. 

The theological discussions of the time seem to 
have been running upon quite a low level, whether 
we take it mentally or morally ; and Lessing would 
hardly have been drawn into them by any sentiment 
less strong than a passionate and powerful sense of 
justice. The Lutheran preachers of the day insisted 
stiffly on the strict construction of the official faith ; 
and, while general thought on higher themes was 
stagnant, a man of letters might well think that he 
could do more and better for the world on other lines, 
though with a secret anger and contempt for the 
whole field of theological disputation. 

It happened that a few years before there had died 
in Hamburg, while Lessing was living there, a learned 
Oriental professor, " a great and famous scholar, Her- 
mann Samuel Eeimarus." He had adopted, in a very 
serious and deliberate way, the opinions commonly 
called deistical, and had written out a careful and 
elaborate Essay, called "An Apology for Eational 
Worshippers of God." This was not meant for 
publication, but to circulate in private as it might 
be copied out by hand. Lessing, v7ho knew the 
family intimately, and had (so to speak) consecrated 
his life to the cause of open debate on everything, 
eagerly sought, with the help of Mendelssohn, an 
opportunity to publish the work. For this, however, 
the time was not ripe, even in the Prussian capital of 
Frederick the Great. The publisher, indeed, was 
willing, but the censor weak. 

But Lessing's privilege as Librarian included, among 



222 THE GEEMAN CRITICS. 

other things, the right to put forth such manuscript 
treasures of the great Library as he might deem worth 
publishing. He reckoned it a piece of justifiable 
craft to add to these treasures the manuscript of 
Eeimarus, and then publish it by instalments as 
" Anonymous Fragments," with misleading guesses as 
to their authorship. The earliest appeared in 1774, 
the others in 1777. Their subjects were, Toleration 
of Deists ; Decrying of Keason in the Pulpit ; A Uni- 
versal Eevelation impossible ; Passage of the Red Sea ; 
the Old Testament not a Eevelation; Narratives of 
the Eesurrection. These were the famous " Wolfen- 
biittel Fragments." And with their publication the 
long battle of Eeason and Eevelation in Germany 
was fairly begun. 

" No one," says Mr. Sime, " could complain that 
these essays were not suf&ciently drastic and plain- 
spoken. The worst that Voltaire had ever said was 
equalled, if not surpassed ; only, while the force of 
Voltaire's objections lay in the incisive wit with 
which they were urged, that of the German scholar 
lay in the thoroughness of his inquiries and his 
obvious moral earnestness." * It may be worth while 
to add that the year when most of these " Fragments " 
were published was the one year of Lessing's su- 
premely happy married life. 

In the controversy which followed, Lessing did 
not make himself an advocate of the opinions of the 

* "Lessing," by James Sime, 2 vols. (Triibner, London), giving 
a very full and admirable study of Lessing's literary work. The 
"Life," by Stalir, translated by Professor Evans (2 vols.), 
nothing to be desired on tlie biographical side. 



THE WOLFENBUTTEL FEAGMENTS. 223 

Fragmentist. He was attacked sharply for the mis- 
chief he was doing in letting them come before the 
public ; and it was on that ground that he made his 
defence. One point he makes is a little curious. 
Such discussions as these, it was urged, should be 
addressed to men of learning and professional theo- 
logians only, and in Latin, not in the vulgar tongue. 
To which he replies — not that the common mind 
is just what should be interested in such things ; but 
that the Devil, who is on the watch for souls, " would 
be the gainer, since for the soul of a German clod- 
hopper, who could be seduced only by German writ- 
ings, he would win the soul of an educated Englishman 
or Frenchman ! " And then, " What of the countries 
where, as in Poland and Hungary, the common man 
understands Latin pretty well ? Must freethinkers 
there be compelled to limit themselves to Greek ? " 
So, by mockery and sarcasm as well as by serious 
argument, he insists on his one point, — the liberty of 
open and free debate. It is in this connection that 
his characteristic and most often quoted confession of 
faith occurs : — 

" Not the truth which a man has, or thinks he has, 
makes his worth ; but the honest pains he has taken to 
come at the truth. For the powers in which alone his 
increasing perfection, lies, expand not through the posses- 
sion of truth, but the search for it. Possession makes one 
easy, sluggish, and proud. If God should hold shut up in 
his right hand all truth, and in his left only the ever-eager 
effort after truth, though with the condition that I should 
always and forever err, and should say to me, Choose ! I 
would humbly faU at his left hand, and say, Father, 



224 THE GERMAN CRITICS. 

give ! pure truth is for Tliee alone (ist j'a dock nur fiir 
Dick allein)." * 

We have nothing here to do with Lessing's opinions, 
as such. These, indeed, were still chaotic and un- 
formed upon many points which later study has made 
tolerably clear. The interest for us is the spirit with 
which he broke ground in the debate, the mental 
courage and decision with which he looked out upon 
the cloudy track that lay close before him. Indeed, 
he lived barely long enough to enter upon that track, 
and summon others to follow. 

One point — which we may call the point of his 
fundamental religious faith — he kept steadily in view : 
his faith, which was like Milton's, that the honest 
search for truth is a right and safe thing, whatever it 
leads to. In his own understanding of it, this did 
not lead him outside the limits of Christianity. 
When he tries to put it in his own words, it becomes 
the finest formal definition ever given of what we 
mean by Divine Providence in the realm of Thought, 
as found in his little Essay on " the Education of the 
Human Race," in its opening sentence : " What Edu- 
cation is to the Individual, that Revelation is to 
Mankind." The illustrations by which he foUows up 
this hint are found in the paragraphs which have 
been called " Lessing's Hundred Thoughts."! Shrewd, 
suggestive, eloquent, profound, tender by turns, they 
express not only his opinions, — many of which were 
provisional, and are outgrown, — but his deep religious 
conviction also, the ripe fruit of his long brooding 

* From the Duplik (" Rejoinder," 1778). 
■\ In Harriet Martineau's " Miscellanies." 



lessing's ceitical theoey. 225 

upon the lessons of human history, interpreted by the 
experience of life. 

For it was a favorite thought with him, that noth- 
ing of the great beliefs which have come to men for 
strength and comfort in the stress of life — beliefs 
which he was content to hold as given first, outright, 
by direct and special communication from God — is 
contrary to human reason, and that none of them can 
be lost. What was first a truth of revelation becomes 
in time a truth of reason. What the mind could not 
discover, it is fully competent to verify and defend ; 
even to re-discover, as it were, by going back upon its 
own experience, and following out the laws of thought. 
That it is so with the moral law, with the one life of 
humanity, with the Divine Unity, which is oneness of 
the Universal Life, all men see. So (he thinks) it is, 
even now, with the belief of immortality, and with the 
symbol of the Christian trinity ; and so — he grasps 
and strives for some adequate expression, which he 
seems to find in a sort of metempsychosis — with his 
faith in a larger religion of Humanity. 

Lessing's positive contribution to the literature of 
biblical criticism was in the form of a " New Hypoth- 
esis concerning the Evangelists regarded as merely 
Human Writers." Of this it has been said that " the 
fragment we now possess consists only of about 
twenty pages, yet it is not too much to say that it was 
the most valuable contribution made to biblical litera- 
ture in the eighteenth century." The " hypothesis " 
was the same that was afterwards worked out in detail 
by Eichhorn, of a " primitive Gospel," or early body of 
written tradition, from which each of the four Evan- 
15 



226 THE GERMAN CEITICS. 

gelists drew the material which best served his imme- 
diate purpose in writing. 

An hypothesis is, by intention, a starting-place, 
not a goal. No one would now maintain this par- 
ticular theory in the shape it had in Lessing's mind. 
But it served two uses, indispensable then. It 
brought the whole matter in debate out of the field 
of dogma into that of literary criticism ; and it led 
men to think of the Four Gospels no longer as so 
many fixed irreducible facts, but as phenomena sub- 
ject to the same laws of genesis and construction 
that we apply to all other growths of human thought. 
To appreciate the value of this service, we should 
remember that it was nearly twenty years earlier 
than Wolf's famous Prolegomena to Homer (1795), 
which is generally held to be the point of depar- 
ture of the later, or scientific, criticism. 

Incidentally, the work of Lessing did another thing. 
It limited the field of biblical criticism — or rather, 
defined the spot on the field where its chief work was 
to be done — to the story of the Evangelists. This 
means not only that the battle must be fought about 
the very inmost sanctuary of traditionary or historic 
belief; but that all the questions of the so-called 
higher criticism — philosophic, historical, scientific — 
are speedily seen to be involved. 

To meet such questions as these required a class of 
minds trained in intellectual methods more profound 
and independent than those of the eighteenth-century 
theology. The intellectual revolution signified by the 
birth of the Critical Philosophy and by the name of 
Kant was heralded, in the very year of Lessing's 



THE CRITICAL SCHOOLS. 227 

death, by the publication of the " Critique of Pure 
Eeason." We have nothing to do with the schemes 
of Philosophy, negative or constructive, that have 
risen since that date. But it is distinctly to be under- 
stood that the three best known schools of biblical 
criticism appearing in the present century are more 
or less directly the product of the great impulse to 
speculative thought given by Kant and his successors. 

The three schools of biblical criticism just spoken 
of are known as the Eationalistic school, represented 
by the name of Paulus ; the Mythic school, repre- 
sented by the name of Strauss ; and the Scientific or 
Historical school, represented by the name of Baur. 
All the forms of what is sometimes called " German 
rationalism " or " German infidelity," so far as regards 
the interpretation of the biblical record, belong with 
more or less modification to some one of these three 
recognized schools. These are what we are to try to 
understand, and we must do this rather in their 
methods than in their details or their results. 

In one point they are all agreed, — which, indeed, 
may be called a maxim of any scientific method, — 
that the miraculous, as such, can have no place in the 
critical interpretation of the facts of history.* In 
other words, if we are to have any intelligent exposi- 
tion of those facts, we must treat them exactly as we 
would the alleged facts of any other narrative, or any 
other period, which we may have to examine. And 
then, by the principles universally admitted, it only 
depends on the strength of our solvent, how many of 

* The rationale of Miracles is 'briefly considered in " Our Liberal 
Movement," pp. 129-142. 



228 THE GEEMAN CKITICS. 

tliem we shall reduce to " the natural order." What 
cannot be reduced will remain as the foothold of a 
" supernaturalism " which, in the view of the modern 
critic, is seen to be only temporary and provisional. 
Kant's own dictum on this subject is that " Miracles 
may be admitted in theory, and for the past ; but not 
in practice, and for the present." 

The critical method — as implied in these words 
of Kant — does not, then, directly attack the dogma 
of supernaturalism. It only, so to speak, displaces it 
by degrees, as one class of facts after another is seen 
to yield before the solvent, which it continues to 
apply in doses of increasing strength. It is from 
this point of view, not that of outright dogmatic 
denial of the supernatural, that we have briefly to 
review the three successive schools of criticism 
already mentioned. The first, that of Paulus, is 
generally referred to the impulse given directly by 
the philosophy of Kant. ' The second, that of Strauss, 
is regarded as an application of the method and the 
principles of Hegel. The third, that of Baur, is to 
be viewed as the fruit of a more advanced growth 
of critical learning generally, and in particular of 
scientific criticism as applied to the interpretation 
of history. 

The methods of Paulus and of Strauss are both 
what we may call speculative, or dogmatic. Each 
takes his own principle, or rule of interpretation, and 
fits the facts of the case to it as he best can. Each 
applies his own method to the most intricate and 
difficult form in which the problem can be put, — to 
the Four Gospels as they stand. These are assumed as 



PAULUS. 229 

literary data. They are compositions having a defined 
character, date, and authorship, in which the facts 
recorded are, for the purposes of the critic, ultimate 
and fixed facts. Either of these interpretations can 
subsist only by denial or extinction of the other. 
And accordingly we find that the most radical and 
remorseless confutation of the rationalism of Paulus 
is contained in the introductory argument of Strauss. 

They differ in this. To Strauss the supernatural- 
ism which shows everywhere on the face of the New 
Testament narrative is the play of a free creative 
imagination, the reflex of traditions, beliefs, religious 
ideals, and national hopes. It is, in short, to be read 
as a strain of pure poetry. To Paulus the same nar- 
rative of facts is to be read as the most literal, natu- 
ral, and simple prose. 

The mind of Paulus was prepared to take this view 
not only by the school of philosophy in which he had 
been trained, but by the circumstances of his own 
home life. His father — a worthy and somewhat 
sentimental, while very orthodox, religionist — was 
broken in mind and heart by the death of his wife 
when his boy was only six years old. He began, with- 
in no long time, to be comforted by visions in which 
she was brought back to him, and they held discourse 
together familiarly as of old. These visions presently 
became part of his religious faith, no doubt the most 
lively and genuine part of it ; and he gave great scan- 
dal by insisting on his private revelations, and even 
printing books about them, till in the judgment of 
his religious fellows he was held to be insane. 

As often happens in the immediate family of those 



230 THE GERMAN CRITICS. 

whose religion runs to such visions and visitations, 
his son was made only the more sceptical and the 
more rationalizing in temper the more the visions 
multiplied. He, too, was a preacher, acceptable and 
devout ; and with him too, as with Kant, the real 
significance of religion was not in " visions and reve- 
lations of the Lord " (of which the Apostle Paul speaks 
a little doubtfully), but in the plain and perhaps 
rather dry moralities of human life. He did not go 
very deep into the criticism of the Gospel text. He 
rather took it as it stood without demur, and held 
himself to be an honest and straightforward inter- 
preter of its meaning. Anxiously, and apparently 
with perfect honesty, he sets himself to the task of 
expounding the narrative, verse by verse, phrase by 
phrase, patiently and ingeniously faithful to explain 
away all that can affront the sober reason. 

He does not charge the wonders to any dishonesty 
in those who told them ; only to credulity in those 
who believed there was any miracle in them. Miracle 
is to be admitted only in the last resort, — like the 
proof of guilt in a criminal court. It is not only per- 
fectly legitimate, it is a clear duty, to try every other 
explanation first. The principle is quite simple and 
clear: the applications of it are always ingenious, 
often plausible. They are given in little dissertations, 
which are sometimes masterpieces of skill.* 

In many cases, the result is what we might easily 

* Particularly the detailed exposition of the raising of Lazarus, 
which, as well as the case of the young man at Nain, is treated as 
a rescue from the horrors of premature burial : for to bring back a 
departed spirit to this life of jiain (he says) would be sheer cruelty. 



PAULUS. 231 

anticipate ; and, as we might also expect, the poetic 
beauty and tenderness have vanished in the exposi- 
tion. Thus the Shepherds were well acquainted at 
the " inn " or hostelry where the child's birth was 
hourly looked for, and what they took for angels were 
flickerings in the sky. The Wise Men heard of the 
event, quite accidentally, at Jerusalem, most likely 
through Anna the prophetess. The Temptation is " a 
dreamlike vision." The Transfiguration is a secret 
conference with certain confidential messengers, who 
disappear just at the sudden glow of sunrise. The 
feeding of the Five Thousand is a generous love-feast : 
those crowds journeying to some great festival always 
took abundance of food with them. The penny is 
never even said to have been found in the fish's 
mouth : it was evidently the market-price it sold for. 
Jesus did not walk on the sea, but hy the sea : the 
common understanding of it would make a miracle 
turn on a preposition {pliilologiscJies Mirakel). The 
daughter of Jairus was " not dead but sleeping," as 
Jesus said she was. All the stories of the Eesurrec- 
tion are elaborately harmonized and explained, in 
view of the supposition that Jesus himself revived 
from the apparent death of swooning and exhaustion, 
and himself pushed back the stone from the mouth 
of the sepulchre ; and for the Ascension we have a 
scene in which he is at last tenderly led away, to be 
cared for by near friends. 

In all this, Paulus means no offence to religious 
feeling. On the contrary, he is profuse, and mani- 
festly quite sincere, in urging the divine — at least 
the paramount — claims of Jesus himself, and the 



232 THE GERMAN CRITICS. 

good faith of the Gospel narrative. To him this is 
the natural and sensible interpretation of the facts. 
It is also their religious interpretation. A great 
stumbling-block (he thinks) is taken out of the way 
of true Christianity if other men will only consent 
to see these things as he does. 

While the theological world was wrangling over 
this plain-spoken rendering, and the question seemed 
to be, how far reason could be allowed to take a hand 
in the discussion, if at all, suddenly a new challenge 
was thrown down by " a young doctor, hot and glow- 
ing from the forge," as Luther once described himself. 
That challenge was Strauss's "Life of Jesus." The 
tone of this was curiously confident, even haughty 
and disdainful. It asked and gave no terms whatever^ 
as to either party in the debate. The supernaturalist 
it treated with brief contempt ; the rationalist it re- 
futed with perhaps superfluous labor. 

Strauss was the disciple and champion of a philoso- 
phy no longer merely critical, but constructive and 
dogmatic. The school of Hegel claimed to find in 
their method a universal solvent for aU matters of 
fact or dogma. Everything was to be taken in the 
terms of the new metaphysics. Everything was to 
be regarded as only a step in the process of evolution 
of the Absolute, and to be interpreted as the symbol 
of an Idea. All opinions were true, so far forth as 
they were held as " presentation " ( Vorstdlung) of the 
incomprehensible, or at least uncomprehended, spir- 
itual fact ; all were false which pretended to be more 
than that. 

The doctrines of the Orthodox creed, the facts of 



STEAUSS. 233 

the Gospel legend were all true ; only they must be 
taken in a transcendental sense. The Incarnation, 
Eesurrection, Ascension, Atonement, Immortal Life, 
state to our thought the poetic symbol under which 
we are to apprehend the intellectual conditions and 
laws of human life, or the eternal unfolding of the 
Absolute Idea. The Idea survives, though the symbol 
has passed away. The ghost remains, when the body 
of doctrine is long dead. And we had best continue 
to caU the ghost by the old familiar name. 

In the sphere of history, — notably in a history 
purely religious and symbolic, like that of the Gos- 
pels, — we are not, according to Strauss, dealing with 
anything so gross as facts, to be either accepted or 
denied in their carnal sense. We are dealing with 
that halo of poetry, fable, or " myth " — that is, the 
narrative embodiment of an ideal or moral truth — - 
which Christian fancy, working at a time that was 
creative and revolutionary, not critical, had caught 
from Jewish dreams, and woven about the sub- 
stance — meagre and all but forgotten — of the 
historical life of Jesus. 

The entire, even disdainful, confidence with which 
this view was put forth, as well as the singular wealth 
and facility of learning in the exposition, made in 
the face of gray pedantry by a theologian of twenty- 
seven, had much to do with the fact that Strauss was 
spokesman of a dogmatic school of philosophy, in the 
flush of its early intellectual triumph ; and that his 
work was even less an original essay than it was the 
application of a ready-made order of ideas to a sub- 
ject which had been beaten thoroughly into shape 



234 THE GERMAN CRITICS. 

under tlie blows of a half-century of debate. The 
Lcben Jcsu was called "an epoch-making book." It 
was so, especially, in the sense that it lifted the 
whole subject of discussion off the plane of wrang- 
ling literalism, where it had been lying, and dealt with 
it on the higher levels of abstract philosophy. 

Of course, the argument was misunderstood. The 
word " myth," which signifies an unconscious poetry, 
was popularly thought to mean a wilful lie; and, 
where it was rightly understood, it naturally roused 
only the deeper repugnance. To the earlier belief 
the marvels of the Testament were both poetry and 
fact. Spare them as fact, and even if you put a low 
interpretation upon them, still you have something 
left, — the nucleus, possibly, of what will at least 
have a moral value, out of which a religious meaning 
may grow at length. But dissolve them into poetry 
and myth ; make them mere " presentations " of an 
idea ; turn them, in other words, into mere illustra- 
tions of the laws of human thought, having neither 
historic reality nor moral significance, — and, truly, 
Christianity itself has passed away in a dissolving 
view. This notion, more or less obscurely conceived, 
embittered the animosity of attack ; and it seems to 
be reflected in the gloom of Strauss's later "Eetro- 
spect," as well as in his haughty withdrawal from the 
better sympathies of his own age. 

It will be noticed that both the methods just de- 
scribed agree in attacking the critical problem in its 
most intricate and difficult forms. Each, naturally, 
solves it by a certain off-hand dogmatism, which ad- 
mits no compromise or reconciliation. On such terms 



BAUR. 235 

as these the debate might go on forever, without posi- 
tive result. One other way remains, which we may 
call the scientific or historical ; and of this the essen- 
tial thing will be to approach the same problem indi- 
rectly, by aid of premises and inductions obtained in 
some other quarter. This is the method represented 
by the eminent name of Ferdinand Christian Baur. 

The starting-point consists in the definite concep- 
tion of Christianity as an historical religion, — a 
development, in the field of history, of certain reli- 
gious, moral, or speculative ideas. The first decisive 
step will be taken, when we seize some one moment 
of this development, in which we can get the facts at 
first-hand, and trace the conditions intelligently. 

Such a moment — the earliest we can get — is at 
the date of the first Christian writings of undisputed 
genuineness. And it was what we may call the 
Columbus's egg of criticism, — the sudden practical 
solution of a problem that had seemed insoluble, by 
a process so simple that it seemed impossible it should 
not have been tried before, — when Baur transferred 
the discussion from the obscure and disputed ground 
of the Evangelists to the acknowledged writings of the 
Apostle Paul. Whatever else may be in doubt, at all 
events the argument of Galatians, Corinthians, and 
Eomans was addressed to the Christian mind not 
long after the middle of the first century ; and these 
writings certainly reflect the beliefs, the disputes, the 
intellectual conditions of the Christian community at 
that time. 

It is unnecessary to follow here, in any detail, the 
inferences and discussions that ensued, developed 



236 THE GERMAN CRITICS. 

with an industry, ability, and massive learning, which 
soon gave a marked and preponderant weight to the 
"Tubingen School" of critics. One or two charac- 
teristic features, or tendencies, in this school come 
by right within the briefest historical review. 

What first attracts our notice in these writings of 
Paul, especially the earliest, is the collision between 
what we have learned to call the " Petrine " and the 
"Pauline" interpretation of Christianity, — one mak- 
ing it a Jewish sect ; the other aiming at a universal, 
or at any rate an independent, religion. We have, 
then, at the outset, a conflict of ideas, — which, in 
fact, we follow easily down to their reconciliation, past 
the middle of the second century. This conflict, as we 
may assume, gives us a clew to the motive and spirit 
of all the Christian writings of that period ; and it 
especially throws light, in a very instructive way, 
upon the composition of the several Evangelists, 
and of the Book of Acts. 

In particular, by studying the conditions of this 
conflict, we are very much helped in fixing approx- 
imately the dates of the several compositions, — a 
fundamental and essential thing in the understanding 
of the earlier Christian history. For example, the 
historical method may be almost said to supersede 
that of literary criticism, in making it certain that 
the Fourth Gospel was not the work of the Apostle 
John, but belongs to a time when Greek speculation 
was fully naturalized in the Christian body, — in a 
word, almost certainly, after the final destruction of 
the Jewish people in A. D. 135.* Earlier dates are 

* The lack of historical sense and the purely speculative motive 



BAUR. 237 

fixed with less precision; but the tentative or pro- 
visional assignment, which this theory makes prob- 
able, gives the highest interest and value to the study 
of the first movements of Christian thought. With- 
out committing ourselves to the result, we shall at 
least acknowledge the inestimable service of the 
method. 

The literary problem of the Gospels is thus ap- 
proached indirectly. The positions occupied are not 
forced : they are such as fall of themselves before the 
advance of constructive criticism. Properly speaking, 
this does not aim to establish a foregone conclusion ; 
only to ascertain, as nearly as may be, the fact of the 
case as the mist slowly passes off. The old question 
of natural and supernatural is not even raised, any 
more than it is in studying the antiquities of Eome 
or the geological strata of the globe. AU that is 
wanted is a groundwork, however slender, of ascer- 
tained fact. Tliere is absolutely no reason why the 
most rigid supernaturalist should not take the full 
benefit of this method, as far as it will go, without 
disturbing his previous opinions in the least, — unless 
they should happen to give way before the different 
mental habit that will have been slowly growing 
up. No room is left for that particular line of 
controversy. 

But every method has its own weakness, as well as 
its own strength. Perhaps the most fruitful idea ever 
introduced into this field of discussion was that of the 

in Strauss, on the contrary, are seen in his admission of the prob- 
able authorship of John in the third edition of the Leben Jesu, and 
his retraction of it in the fourth. 



238 THE GERMAN CRITICS. 

early conflict of Petrine and Pauline Christiauity> 
cropping out here and there, more or less consciously, 
all over the ground of investigation. The fault would 
appear to have been in forcing it, unnecessarily, into 
every detail. Surely, a very large part of the early 
Christian writings are as far as possible from being 
controversial. They are practical, sentimental, sym- 
pathetic, pious, ethical. They have always been 
used for edification, not dispute. They are, to the 
common eye at least, quite innocently unconscious of 
any polemic motive {Tendenz), such as this theory 
constantly aims to force upon them. It is likely, 
even, that far the largest part of the Christian thought 
was bestowed upon, and that far the largest part of 
the Christian writings reflect, no such controversies 
whatever as are here assumed, but were occupied 
with quite a different set of interests and conflicts ; 
so that they suffer great distortion through the pow- 
erful refracting lens of scientific criticism, as it has 
been employed. The vital is constantly, and quite 
wrongly, overlaid by the polemic. The great service 
of this school of critics lay in conquering the field. 
Its reduction and tillage are likely to find something 
for other hands to do. 

The admirable and most fruitful results of this 
method, applied in the kindred province of Old Tes- 
tament criticism, by the so-called " Dutch School," I 
have detailed before.* It only remains to hint at the 
chief lack which has still to be supplied. 

So far, the subject of Biblical Criticism has been 
kept almost wholly within pretty sharply marked and 

* See Hebrew Men and Times, lutrod. pp. xx.-xxiv. 



COMPAEATIVE STUDY OF RELIGIONS. 239 

well understood boundaries. It has made a province 
of erudition by itself, — too far apart from contact 
and comparison with other provinces. Christianity 
as an historical religion, particularly in its origin and 
first development, was powerfully stamped by the 
genius, temper, and traditions of a very peculiar 
people. Tor a really scientific study of it, we should 
need comparison with the genius, temper, and tradi- 
tions of many other peoples. This was not possible 
while that one field was marked off, as " sacred learn- 
ing," for professional theologians. And the habit of 
regarding themselves as somehow confined within its 
boundaries has been kept up, quite needlessly, by the 
more independent scholars and critics who have had 
their training as professional theologians. 

In short, it still remains to make Biblical Criti- 
cism a recognized thing in the cosmopolitan realm of 
learning. Such scholars as Max Miiller and Ernest 
Eenan, — not primarily theologians, but one of them 
a philologist, and the other a man of letters, — 
will have more weight with the next generation of 
Christian students than Paulus or Strauss or Baur 
or Ewald or Kuenen. 

Hitherto, again, the interest taken in the compar- 
ative study of Eeligions has been mostly specula- 
tive, — a comparison of ideas ; of manners, perhaps ; 
possibly, of men. What is further needed is to find 
a real ground of comparison in the origin of historical 
religions ; the facts and conditions of their genesis, 
growth, and transformations ; the development, in 
short, of the great Faiths of Humanity, studied with 
a purely scientific motive, from an historical or psycho- 



240 THE GEKMAN CRITICS. 

logical poiat of view. No phenomenon can be rightly 
understood, if studied separate and alone. The prob- 
lem of the rise of Christianity is to be regarded, then, 
not as a thing apart, but as one illustration — certainly 
the most signal and impressive illustration — of a 
very wide range of fact and law. 

Nor would this be so far to seek, if scientific critics 
would only open their eyes to what is directly about 
them, instead of looking through a narrow tube at 
phenomena more than eighteen hundred years away. 
Quite within my own recollection, all the conditions 
have been found for the rise of an historical religion in 
at least four cases, and I know not how many more : 
that of the Mormons and Spiritists in America, the 
B^b in Persia, and the Brahrao Somaj in India; to 
say nothing of Comte's " Eeligion of Humanity," or 
the revolutionary faith of Socialism. Probably all of 
these will soon be crushed out (if they have not been 
already) by special circumstances, or else absorbed in 
wider faiths. But under other circumstances either 
of them might well grow to be historically as inter- 
esting, if not so important, as Parsism, Buddhism, or 
Islam.* 

Nor do they lack their accompaniment of marvel. 
Mormonism has its clumsy legend, which is an article 
of faith with myriads ; and in the circles of Spiritism 
many of us have witnessed phenomena which two or 
three centuries ago we should not have hesitated to 

* The "Spectator" of March 17, 1883, mentions an official re- 
port " that a tribe in Orissa has adopted Queen Victoria as its 
deity ; " and adds, that " there is absolutely no impossibility in its 
spread, and if it spread, the consequences would be incalculable." 



THE SERVICE OF CRITICISM. 241 

ascribe to miracle or to inspired prophecy. All these, 
scientifically studied, would make historical parallels 
of approach to the investigation of the first Christian 
age. 

Most of the controversies that have risen about the 
Origin of Christianity, considered as an isolated phe- 
nomenon, are already sterile. They repel instead of 
attracting many of the ablest and most highly culti- 
vated minds of our time. But, if the superhuman 
interest fails, at least the human interest remains. 
The circumstances under which a great and victorious 
faith was born into the world, — a faith which shaped 
the civilization and trained the best thought of man- 
kind for more than a thousand years ; a faith which, 
in all manner of disguises, is as alive to-day as ever, — 
cannot possibly lack interest to any one who is capable 
of taking an intellectual interest in anything. 

To restore that interest, if it be possible, and to 
make it of service in a nobler way than merely to 
gratify a barren curiosity, or yield material to scho- 
lastic pedantry, or furnish fresh weapons to polemic 
rancor, is the proper task of that which may still call 
itseK the higher Christian scholarship. A needful 
preparation for this broader task is found in the work 
done by those schools of Biblical Criticism which we 
have briefly reviewed. They were the necessary out- 
growth of speculative philosophy, in the attitude it 
has held in the last hundred years ; and their prelim- 
inary work has been required, in order that Eeligion 
— free from technical and unscientific limitations — 
may find its right place in the world of modern 
thought. 



SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 

ACENTUEY and a half of destructive analysis 
had begun with Descartes and ended with 
Kant; and this had involved, as side-issues, those 
movements of radical criticism which we have seen 
in England, France, and Germany. The authority of 
Church and the authority of Creed had both been 
thoroughly undermined. To preserve the structure 
built upon them might still seem possible if, before 
it quite collapsed, a new foundation could be substi- 
tuted for the old, by one of those ingenious processes 
known to our modern engineering : in short, a trans- 
suhstantiation of the creed. 

That structure — the visible fabric of Christian 
theology — includes two things: a system of Belief, 
or speculative dogma; and a system of Morals, or 
practical ethics. In real life, the two are found 
closely bound together; so that where belief was 
most completely shattered, as in France, the decay 
of morality was also most profound.* And, in pro- 
portion to its sincerity, men's belief has always been 
asserted to be inseparably bound up with the inter- 
ests of general morality. 

Still, in theory at least, the two are quite distin- 

* That Germauy was not at all events far behind, see Bieder- 
mann, Deutschland im achizcJmtcn JahrJmndert, vol. ii. p. 28. 



AN ECCLESIASTICAL EEVIVAL. 243 

guishable ; and, while they may be threatened by the 
same danger, they will defend themselves in very dif- 
ferent ways. The speculative dogma will seek to 
fortify itself by some constructive system of philoso- 
phy ; the practical ethics will seek to establish itself 
on a scientific base. In the era of reconstruction 
which follows the crisis of a revolution, we shall 
therefore find — looking from the religious point of 
view — a movement of speculative theology, attended 
or followed by an effort to find in positive science a 
practical guide of life. These two will, accordingly, 
make the closing topics in the historical survey which 
is here attempted. 

But, before dealing directly with the former, — the 
problems or the systems of speculative theology, — it 
is well to glance for an instant at those signs of the 
times which show that the first half of the nineteenth 
century was a period of vigorous ecclesiastical revi- 
val. In fact, the brilliant and imposing systems of 
religious philosophy, which to many have seemed to 
give a new life to the old creeds of Christendom, are 
only symptoms, among many others, of the powerful 
reaction that set in after the great storms of the rev- 
olutionary era. In Politics we find, as a chief symp- 
tom, the Holy Alliance ; in Letters, the conservative 
swing shown so strikingly by Wordsworth in Eng- 
land, by Chateaubriand in France, and by the Schlegels 
in Germany ; in Art, the sudden effulgence and pre- 
dominance of Eomanticism. This reactionary drift 
may be said, in a general way, to be as distinctly 
characteristic of the first half of the century as it has 
yielded suddenly since, before the new invasions of 



244 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 

the scientific spirit. Its most marked and interesting 
exhibitions, however, have been within strictly eccle- 
siastical lines, at what we may call the two poles 
of the sacerdotal sphere : in the Ultramontanism of 
Eome, and in the Tractarianism of Oxford. 

The conservative instinct of the hierarchy, which 
found itself threatened in the Eevolution with such a 
deadly blow, naturally took refuge in a Centralism 
that made Eome more and more the one seat of au- 
thority, till it culminated in 1870 by forcing the 
dogma of Papal Infallibility upon the reluctant as- 
sent of Catholic Christendom. The political symp- 
toms of it are found in the Concordat of 1801, rein- 
forced after the fall of Napoleon ; the formal league 
between the Church and Absolutism in the Holy 
Alliance (1815) ; the restoring of the Jesuits at the 
same date, with the renewed activity of the Inqui- 
sition and the Propaganda ; the bitterly repressive 
policy of Gregory XVI. (1831-1846), with his decla- 
ration of hostility against natural science and popular 
liberty ; the long papacy of Pius IX. (1846-1878), 
including the suppression of his own liberal leanings 
under Jesuit control ; the famous Syllabus of Errors, 
which denounced the whole spirit of modern civiliza- 
tion and intelligence ; and the crowning dogma of 
Infallibility (1870), which was instantly foUowed by 
tlie abolition of the Temporal Power. 

This last event, while a great seeming defeat of the 
Papacy, brings into clearer relief the measures by 
which the Church of Eome has sought to confirm 
itself as a spiritual power. This has been, especially, 
by making its appeal more and more to emotional 



ROME AND OXFORD. 245 

piety, and confirming its hold on the ignorant and 
sentimental as a religion of the imagination and the 
heart. Symptoms of this are found, on one side, in a 
great revival of ecclesiastical and romantic Art under 
the auspices of the Church ; and, on another side, in 
the renewal by Leo XII. (1823-1829) of the " wor- 
ship of the Sacred Heart ; " in miracles such as that 
of Lourdes, and pilgrimages such as that of the Holy 
Coat at Treves ; in emotional and impassioned preach- 
ing, such as that of Lacordaire at Paris.* These 
things do not make our subject ; and I only speak of 
them, in passing, to reinforce the thought that we are 
dealing with a period of ecclesiastical reaction, not 
merely with a phase of speculation which we might 
treat as if it were accidental and alone. 

The Oxford movement would give us, biographi- 
cally considered, one of the most tempting of themes. 
Sucli a noble vindication of its motive as we find in 
Newman's Apologia, such a personal record as that 
of Keble, such curious side-glimpses as come to us 
in Mozley's " Eeminiscences," above all the clear and 
vigorous exhibitions of it given by Mr. Froude,f might 
charm us to linger on the road with them. But it 
would be taking us, after all, out of the path of our 
argument. Tractarianism is only an episode, even in 
the ecclesiastical life of England. What was most 
logical and vigorous in it went at length to Eome ; 
and the whole of its fascinating story illustrates 
much better a mood of mind rec[uiring to be met, 

* This subject is very fully treated by Laurent : Le CafJwlicisme 
et la lleligion cle VAvenir (2 vols. Paris), 
t Short Studies, Fourth 



246 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 

than it does any well-considered and skilful way of 
meeting it. 

The special movement of thought in which we are 
now interested may be said to date back as far as 
the vehement and rather febrile protest of Eousseau 
against the materialism of his own day. For it hap- 
pened that in 1761 Frederic Henry Jacobi, then a 
youth of eighteen, was living in Geneva as a business 
clerk, and that here he was powerfully influenced by 
Eousseau's writings, particularly " liimile " and the 
" Savoyard Vicar." Personally he was repelled from 
Eousseau by the " Confessions," and came under quite 
a different influence ; * but he kept a great esteem 
for what he regarded as the finest genius of France, 
and owed to that example his " leap " {Sprung) from 
materialism to the condition of mind which takes 
spiritual realities for granted. " You see," said he 
to a friend, in his old age, " I am still the same ; a 
pagan in my understanding, but a Christian to the 
bottom of my heart." 

Jacobi (1743-1819) is generally recognized as the 
earliest witness, or interpreter, of that powerful move- 
ment of religious thought in Germany, which is still 
one of the most vital intellectual forces of the day. 
In particular, his name is held to stand for the 
opinion that spiritual things are " perceived " by an 
interior or transcendental sense, — as precisely and 

* In particular, Jacobi came under the powerful influence of Bon- 
net, a Genevan preacher, who seems to have been the recognized 
head of an emotional religious movement, and author of certain 
pious meditations upon Nature, which the young Jacobi "knew 
almost by heart. " See Hettner's History of German Literature, vol. 
iii. pp. 316-324. 



jACOBi. 247 

legitimately as, for example, visible things are per- 
ceived by the eye. If he did put his doctrine in that 
form, it must have been, apparently, by way not of 
dogma but of illustration. At twenty-one he had 
" plunged into Spinoza," and he is considered to have 
done the German mind the service of reviving the 
memory of the great Pantheist. But he is far from 
being satisfied with that line of thought. " Specula- 
tion alone," he says, " attains only to [the idea of] 
Substance, — a blank Necessity." " What I need," he 
says again, " is not a truth which should be of my 
making, but that of which I myself should be the 
creature." * 

Far from the logical consistency which most Ger- 
mans affect in their religious philosophy, Jacobi is 
very impatient of method. All logic, he holds, leads 
to fatalism ; and to each of the great speculative 
schools of his day he finds himself equally opposed. 
" All philosophy," he says, " built upon thought that 
can be clearly stated to the intellect (hegriffsmdssige) 
gives for bread a stone, for God's living personality 
the mechanism of Nature, for free-will a rigid Neces- 
sity." " In proceeding from Nature we find no God : 
God is first, or not at all." " We know the truth not 
[according to Kant] by reason, but by faith, feeling, 
instinct," — for he employs all these terms to convey 
his meaning. " Words, dear Jacobi, words," said the 
cool critic Lessing. 

It is the first step that costs. This " first step," 
Jacobi seems never to have been able to make clear 
to his own mind, much less to other minds. It is, 

* Biedermann, vol. iv. p. 850. 



248 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 

after all, a " leap," — a feat impossible to logic, and 
good only in fact to him who is already on the other 
side of the logical gulf At least, it is a reality he is 
striving for, not a figment of the brain : he " would 
fain keep the pearl, while materialist and idealist 
divide the shell between them." His thought is true 
in this : that religion is, as he says, a matter not of 
theory but of life ; known not by inference from 
some other thing, but as a primary fact of expe- 
rience ; " given in our own free act and deed." Per- 
haps his best statement of the thought is that " Eea- 
son, as distinct from sense, perceives not only objects 
that are good, beautiful, and true, but that which is 
primarily or ideally good, beautiful, and true;" and 
" because one sees this face, he knows that a spirit 
lives in him and a Spirit above him." Again, let us 
do Jacobi the justice of hearing him in his own 
words : — 

" As religion makes a man a man, and as that alone lifts 
him above the brutes, so too it makes him a philosopher. 
As piety strives by devout purpose to fulfil the will of 
God, so religious insight seeks to know or understand the 
unknown (Verborgene) . It was the aim of my philosophy 
to deal with this religion, the centre of all spiritual life ; 
not the acquisition of further scientific knowledge, which 
may be had without philosophy. Communion with Na- 
ture should help me to communion with God. To rest in 
Nature, and learn to do without God, and to forget him 
in it, I would not." 

" I have been young and now am old ; and I bear 
witness that I have never found thorough, pervading, 
enduring virtue with any but such as feared God, — not in 
the modern, but in the old childlike, way. And only 



JACOBI. 249 

with such, too, have I found joy in life, — a hearty, vic- 
torious gladness, of so distinct a kind that no other is 
to be compared with it." 

" Light is in my heart ; but as soon as I would bring 
it into my understanding, it goes out. Which of these 
two lights is true, — that of the understanding, which 
indeed shows clearly-defined forms, but back of them a 
bottomless abyss ; or that of the inward glow, which gives 
promise of outward light, but lacks clear intelligence? 
Can the soul of man win truth, except by combination of 
the two 1 And is that combination conceivable, unless by 
miracle 1 " 

We are already on the high road to mysticism. 
But Jacobi, we should bear in mind, was not a phi- 
losopher trained in the methods of the Schools. He 
was educated (as we have seen) to business life ; and 
only by strong bent of genius became a man of 
thought and a man of letters. Naturally, his illogical 
methods scandalized the university men, those aristo- 
crats and monopolists of learning. " This reckless 
fashion," says Kant, " of rejecting all formal thought 
as pedantry betrays a secret purpose, under the guise 
of philosophy, of turning in fact all philosophy out of 
doors ! " 

In short, the real aim of Jacobi was — as he very 
frankly says himself — not to give a logical and 
coherent philosophy of religion. This, he was firmly 
convinced, was to belie its very nature, — as Kant 
himself seems to grant, when he puts it in the field 
of practical and not of speculative reason. What he 
would do is to register a fact of psychology, not a 
process of logic. The " act of faith," as we call it, by 



250 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 

which the mind plants itself on truth of the spiritual 
order, is in fact, as he states it, a " leap " — into the 
dark.* The psychology is precisely the same as Lu- 
ther's : " Believe that you are a child of God, and in 
that act you are his child." 

No process of demonstration, it is likely, ever con- 
vinced anybody of what we must take to be the 
primary data of the religious life. Belief — in the 
sense in which religionists use the word — is not an 
intellectual process : it is a vital one. A man shall 
listen half a lifetime to the most faultless argument 
in proof of some system of doctrine. He accepts the 
premises, he assents to the conclusions, perhaps ; but 
he remains at heart a doubter. Some day a thought 
strikes him suddenly, and shows things in another 
light. Or he goes into a conventicle, or is surprised 
by a sudden peril, or some unexpected word of sym- 
pathy melts him ; and from that hour he believes. 
Not only the one point that is touched, but all the 
latent creed in him becomes luminous in the glow of 
that emotion ; as when an electric spark leaps from 
point to point, making a device or a picture of vivid 
light. It has suddenly become true to him, and he 
implicitly accepts it all. Without a particle of new 

* This "leap" is often (perhaps oftenest) connected, in reli- 
gious experience, with what theologians call conviction of sin, — 
that is, the powerful wakening of moral consciousness in the form 
of an interior conflict, as distinct from simple moral judgment of 
things good as opposed to evil. Compare the testimony of Paul and 
of Augustine, " Early Christianity," pp. 44, 133, 137. The "feel- 
ing of dependence," on which Schleiermacher and others stake it, 
is both feebler in itself, and likely to lead rather to a sentimental 
quietism. The true foundation of religious conviction is moral, 
rather than speculative or emotional. (See above pp. 10, 14.) 



FAITH AS A MORAL ACT. 251 

evidence, he believes in the popular vision of heaven 
and hell, which was a horrid dream to him before ; 
in the Trinity and Atonement, which till now were 
downright falsehood to him ; in the absolute author- 
ity of Bible or Creed, which he had held to be the 
height of unreason. All at once these things have 
become vivid and intense realities to his mind. As 
an intellectual process it is worthless. As a vital 
one, it may carry with it the most far-reaching con- 
sequences, and be, what it is generally called, the 
regeneration of the man. 

All this is the every-day experience of what is 
technically known as "conversion." It takes place 
not only on the lower levels of intelligence or cul- 
ture, as we might be apt to think ; but in a mind of 
force, gravity, and breadth, like that of Chalmers ; in 
a mind brilliant, social, worldly, like that of Wilber- 
force. These deep springs of life are not touched by 
a logical process. That, in general, only trims and 
pares down the spontaneous growth. The chance 
always is that it will cut so deep to the quick, as to 
maim the life. It is by sympathy, by reverence, 
by the kindling of affection, that men believe. Then 
their faith, like a flame, seizes and appropriates such 
material as lies nearest at hand. 

We may easily conceive this faith, in great inten- 
sity, combined with very simple elements of intellec- 
tual belief The mere emotion of piety, however, 
will hardly subsist without something in the mind 
to feed on. Some intellectual element appears to 
be involved in the experience itself ; some article of 
faith, implicitly if not explicitly held. What this is. 



252 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 

in the most simple and fundamental form, we find 
asserted and (if it may be) legitimated in Jacobi's 
philosophy of religion. Of this we have now two 
things to observe. 

In the first place, it includes two things quite dis- 
tinct from each other, — the psychological fact and 
the logical inference. The fact of experience is 
undeniable ; but what can it be said to prove ? Evi- 
dently, not all the beliefs associated with it in the 
believer's mind : not the Scotch Calvinism of Chal- 
mers ; not the evangelical creed of Wilberforce. 
The interior vision, which is asserted to behold 
eternal realities, views them (as Paul says) "in a 
mirror." That mirror cannot possibly be anything 
else than the mind of the beholder. What he sees 
is, primarily, his own thought. The Object seen is 
simply the reflection of the Subject which sees.* 
" God," said Fontenelle, " made man in his own im • 
age ; but then, man does the same by Him." In thu 
language of the Psalmist, God shows himself to the 
merciful as merciful, to the upright as righteous, 
to the pure as pure, to the violent as wrathful. 
Probably no case of such interior perception on rec- 
ord is more vivid and genuine tlian Loyola's vision 
of the Trinity, or the disordered fancy that both saw 
and handled the Sacred Heart. Yet we do not hold 
such things as testimony of any fact beyond the 
mental condition of those to whom they were the 
most convincing of realities. 

In the second place, not only the experience can 

* The reader will recall that Speculation is derived from Specu- 
lum, which means "a mirror." (Compare p. 305, below.) 



THE TESTIMONY OF FAITH. 253 

be no evidence to any other than the believer him- 
self: it is not, strictly speaking, evidence to him. 
It is rather a state of mind which feels no need of 
evidence. Very likely the believer will allege it, to 
prove or confirm in other minds the thing of which 
he is fully assured in his own. But, after all, he 
can only assert the fact that so he thinks. The 
moment we bring it to the test of comparing the 
objects of faith in different minds, of equal vigor 
and perspicacity, we find that the objective validity 
disappears. At most we can say this : that a very 
vivid and intense conviction, in a gifted mind, has 
an incalculable power of creating the like conviction 
in other minds, — like induced electricity, or the mag- 
netizing of a needle ; and that all the great historic 
faiths of mankind have in fact had this origin. And 
it is not difficult, once assuming a profound and vital 
experience in such a mind, to see how what was 
vision there becomes faith, then symbol, then creed, 
as it passes down through other minds. In the first 
it was a primary fact of consciousness, which had no 
need of proof. In the others it becomes an article 
of belief, resting either on the authority of the first, 
or else on a mood of experience which has in like 
manner kindled the emotion of the believer to a 
radiant heat. 

Now it is interesting to observe, in this whole 
chapter of religious history which we are reading, 
that systematic dogma is absolutely lost sight of, 
while the single aim is to vindicate the experience 
itself of the religious life. We are far as yet from 
any new structure, however spectral, of a speculative 



254 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 

theology. The ground is only getting ready. It is, 
as yet, only a single step out of blank materialism. 
The next step in that direction was taken by a man 
widely different in mental outfit, training, and way 
of life from Jacobi, whose testimony is, however, 
fundamentally the same. 

All the profounder schools of religious thought in 
this century date, it is said, from Schleiermacher(1768 
-1834). The great impulse received from him was 
at the very dawn of the century, in his " Discourses " 
{Beden, 1799) and "Monologues" (1800), both com- 
posed in the very crisis of reaction from materialism 
and revolutionary violence. "With him, too, religion 
is no system of dogma, but an ultimate fact of expe- 
rience. Nay, he seems not even to appeal to it as 
evidence of any fact or opinion except such as is 
contained in the experience itself " Eeligion," he 
says, "was the mother's bosom, in whose sacred 
warmth and darkness my young life was fed and 
prepared for the world which lay before me all un- 
known ; and she still remained with me, when God 
and immortality vanished before my doubting eyes." 
And even in his later career it remained, to many, 
" quite uncertain whether Schleiermacher believed or 
not in revelation, miracle, the divinity of Christ, the 
trinity, the personality of God, or the immortality of 
the soul. In his theological phrases, he would avoid 
all that could distinctly mean this or that." 

All this, we notice with some surprise, is said of a 
man who is confessedly a great religious leader, and 
of that period in his life when his influence is most 
powerfully felt in the revival of religious faith. He 



SCHLEIEEMACHER. 255 

addresses his argument to " the educated despisers 
of religion ; " and we involuntarily contrast it with 
the way a similar phase of unbelief was met two 
generations earlier by Butler, who thinks it essential 
to begin by showing the probability of a future life 
and its penal judgments, in the hardest form of posi- 
tive dogma. Religious thought in England had kept 
" the terror of the Lord " quite visible in the back- 
ground of argument. Here, on the contrary, we deal 
only with the primary fact of an experience having 
its root in " a feeling of dependence." Christianity 
itself is defined as " pure conviction," quite apart 
from any historic testimony. We are asked to be- 
lieve only this : that the emotional experience itself 
is genuine and vital. 

If now we compare Schleiermacher with Jacobi, we 
shall find in him less of the busy and restless intel- 
ligence, aiming to legitimate his thought in- a clear 
and coherent statement ; more of the vehement and 
impassioned utterance of the experience itself ; more 
of the ardent appeal to kindred feeling in other 
minds. Here, too, we find in the doctrine an out- 
growth of what was most intensely personal in the 
life. The father of Schleiermacher was a good old- 
fashioned Calvinistic preacher, chaplain to a regi- 
ment ; and, for convenience in some of his wander- 
ings, he put the boy at school among the Moravian 
Brethren. These made the most pious of religious 
communities. In spiritual descent their tradition 
came down from Bohemian exiles, who carried into 
their retreat the same religious ardor that had flamed 
with such obstinate fury in the Hussite wars ; but in 



256 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 

them, or in their followers, it was tempered to a 
sweet, somewhat austere, and most nobly self-sacri- 
ficing piety. It was the placid faitli of a group of 
Moravian missionaries in a storm at sea, that had 
touched John Wesley more profoundly than ever 
before with the reality and power of a religious life. 
And this obscure community was the "mother's 
bosom, warm and dark," which nourished the germs 
of that young life given to its charge. 

The boy proved a boy of genius, of splendid, capa- 
cious, and indefatigable intelligence, who soon out- 
grew his masters. By his father's consent he was 
duly transferred to a German university; and here, 
against his father's vehement remonstrance, he made 
a deliberate study of the objections which free- 
thinkers had urged against the Christian faith. " I 
have been over all that ground myself," his father 
writes, "and know how hard it is to win back the 
peace you are so ready to throw away. Faith is the 
immediate gift of God : go to Him for it on your 
knees, and do not tempt him by making light of that 
gift." He bids his son study Lessing, especially " The 
Education of the Human Eace ; " and is sure, if he 
has intellectual difficulties, he will find them an- 
swered there. 

But books speak one thing to the grave, experi- 
enced man, who reads the running comment of his 
own life between the lines ; quite another thing to 
the eager student, who has eyes and ears only for 
what meets the present demand of his impatient 
spirit. He will know ail that can be said in doubt 
or denial of the faith he is so sure of At least, the 



SCHLEIERMACHER. 257 

one miracle of redemption [Erlosung), which he is 
conscious of in his own soul, — there can be no 
doubting or denying that ! Still, he seems to have 
misreckoned his strength of mind ; and he confesses 
to his father a sort of despair, in seeing so much give 
way that was built in with his faith, which there is 
little prospect that he can ever win back. His father 
can only answer, as before, that faith is the imme- 
diate gift of God, and must be had again on the same 
old terms, — none other. 

This experience, in which everything external had 
been cut down to the quick, happening to him on the 
verge of manhood, was what prepared the way for 
that singular and unalterable religious confidence 
which runs through all the phases of his later mental 
life. These we see, most intelligibly, in his autobi- 
ographic Letters ; for by temperament he eagerly 
craved sympathy, and his correspondence is all trans- 
lucent to the light that beams steadily at the centre. 
There is something sensitive, emotional, feminine, in 
his style of piety. We find it too sentimental. We 
miss a certain manliness in the tone. Especially we 
are surprised to find so free a thinker — one who has 
perhaps done more than any other man to dissolve 
away the shell of dogma from the religious life — so 
keenly sensitive to external rites and ecclesiastical 
symbolism. We have followed him, it may be, 
through the widest ranges of Pagan and Christian 
speculation, into regions where the creed and the 
very name of Christianity seem sublimated to a 
viewless ether; yet his last act is to call for cup 
and platter, to administer the eucharist, feebly, with 
17 



258 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 

dying hands and lips, and even then to justify him- 
self against the imaginary charge that he has neg- 
lected some lesser formularies of the evangelical 
Church, 

In reading a biography which exhibits so much 
more the sentiment of the religious life than the 
dignity and massiveness of character we might have 
looked for, we must still bear in mind, to do him 
justice, the great wealth of his scholarly attainment, 
and the vast intellectual service he has rendered to 
his generation. His translating and expounding of 
Plato is reckoned one of the great exploits of Ger- 
man learning ; his works are a consideral'Je library 
of professional and historic lore ; and Ids volumes of 
systematic theology, in particular, are the fountain- 
head of much of the " liberal orthodoxy " of our day. 
For our present subject, there are two points of view, 
from which we have to regard his work. 

The first is the genuine, unquestionable, and pow- 
erful impulse which he gave to the educated mind of 
Germany by his earlier " Discourses." These were 
not delivered as Addresses, but were printed and 
circulated as Essays. It is not easy to describe or 
account for the effect they are said to have had on 
the general mind. One is inclined to ascribe this 
effect less to anything they say than to their way of 
saying it. Not in respect of literary style, for to 
our mind at least that is vague and long-drawn, as is 
the manner of most German prose. Nor is it vivid- 
ness and force of diction, which, with rare exceptions, 
we hardly find in them. But, more than almost any 
writings of their class, they give the rush of abrupt 



SCHLEIEKMACHER. 259 

and unpremeditated discourse, a frank boldness of 
appeal, a torrent of impetuous conviction, a passion 
and glow of moral earnestness, which transfigure 
and irradiate the dull forms of speech, and fully 
explain the emotion with which they were received. 
It is as if the young man — now thirty-one — haff 
sprung by an uncontrollable impulse to some spot by 
the wayside, where his eager speech, his impassioned 
gesture, his prophetic glow, suddenly arrest the idle 
crowd, and he is felt to speak " as one having author- 
ity." It is but a single thing he has to say. He has 
only to add his word of testimony to the reality of 
the religious life ; to urge that testimony in face of 
the events that make the time grave ; to show what 
is the one thing needful in the intellectual life of 
Germany at such a time. And in doing this he has, 
perhaps without knowing it, taken the first step in 
a great and unique phase of religious development 
in all Protestant Christendom. 

The other thing that comes within our view is the 
method which Schleiermacher applies in the treat- 
ment of religious questions ; in particular how, from 
data so vague and formless as seem to be indicated 
thus far, he attempts to body forth the forms of 
Christian faith. 

Everything, in such a task as this, depends on the 
material in hand to start with. Of matter properly 
speculative or dogmatic, as we have seen, Schleier- 
macher hafe almost nothing. To the last he left it a 
matter of doubt whether any of the points of com- 
mon Christian doctrine were matters of belief with 
him or not. He starts, however, as his postulate. 



260 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 

with this plain matter of fact : / am a Christian. 
By introspection and analysis he will see what that 
fact implies ; and this shall be his Christian creed. 

Now religion means to him " communion of life 
with the living God." This Deity may be Spinoza's, 
— which in fact it seems greatly to resemble. But, at 
all events, God is no dead phrase, no empty name. 
He is the Universal Life ; . and dependence on that 
Source is necessarily an element in all our profounder 
consciousness. Now it is in our dependence on the 
Universal Life that we first find ourselves emanci- 
pated from the world of sense, so that morality be- 
comes possible ; * and in this feeling of our depen- 
dence we have the first essential germ of that 
spiritual life which in its unfolding is Religion. 

Again, following the same method, we find our 
body of doctrine in the data of Christian conscious- 
ness. Here Schleiermacher parts from what is abso- 
lute or universal. It is impossible, from his point of 
view, to find any dogmatic necessity in the Christian 
body of doctrine as such. Such a phrase as that be- 
lief in it is " necessary to salvation " has no longer 
my meaning, — unless it be that a realizing of what 
Dur best thought is, is necessary to our best intellect- 
ual life. If Schleiermacher had been a Mussulman 
or Buddhist, he must by his own metliod have ana- 
lyzed the Mussulman or Buddhist consciousness, and 
not the Christian. There is, accordingly, a seeming 
sophism, or else an illogical narrowing of the ground, 
when, as we presently find, he takes not the human 

* Compare the experience of St. Augustine : "Early Christian- 
ity," p. 138. 



SCHLEIERMACHER. 261 

but the Christian consciousness — not even broadly 
the Christian, but the German-Protestant-Lutheran- 
Moravian-Eeforined religious consciousness — as his 
base of operations, and spends thick volumes in 
building upon it a structure as little differing from 
the old theology in shape and proportion as the land- 
scape reflected in a lake differs from the landscape 
seen beyond the shore. 

Facts of the religious life lend themselves not 
easily, and only by a sophistry perhaps unconscious, 
to be shaped into a dogmatic system. The system 
can at best only co-ordinate, it cannot legitimate, the 
facts. We shall probably not be far wrong, if we con- 
sider that Schleiermacher's essential work, as a man 
of original religious genius, was done in the powerful 
impulse he gave at starting to the higher thought of 
Germany; and if we consider that which followed 
as the valuable but only incidental and s-ubsidiary 
service of a long, devoted, and useful life. 

Strictly speaking, it would appear that the value 
of his service consists more in what he has added to 
our knowledge of the facts of religious experience in 
themselves, than in any system of philosophy built 
upon those facts. The experience itself is the most 
obscure and disputed ground in our study of human 
nature. It is also the highest ground. When we 
find ourselves in the range of those thoughts and 
emotions expressed by such words as contrition, as- 
piration, reverence, reconciliation, religious peace, — 
to say nothing of such more passionate emotions as 
moral heroism, poetic enthusiasm, spiritual ecstasy, 
— then we know that we are dealing with the upper 



262 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 

ranges of experience and character. We touch that 
which is most characteristically human, as distinct 
from the motives and limitations of animal life. 
And he helps us most, for what is best in life, who 
makes us feel, most distinctly and powerfully, that 
that range of it is both attainable and real. 

Now from that region of thought and emotion 
there emerge two or three strongly defined convic- 
tions, which appear to be taken for granted in that 
range of experience just as the reality of the out- 
ward world is taken for granted in every act of per- 
ception. These convictions are what we call the 
fundamental data of religious consciousness ; and they 
are commonly stated to be these three : the Being of 
God, Moral Freedom (or better, perhaps, in this con- 
nection, the Law of Holiness), and the Immortality 
of the Soul.* In what sense are these convictions 
implied in our religious consciousness ? and in what 
sense can they be said to be verified by the facts of 
that consciousness ? These two questions state the 
fundamental problem of speculative theology, as dis- 
tinct from mere psychology on one side, or mere 
dogmatism on the other. 

In approaching this problem, we are met at the out- 
set by two opposite schools, or tendencies of thought, 
— the " positive," which limits us strictly to the facts 
themselves, with the laws of sequence and associa- 
tion to be traced among them; and the "transcen- 

* In the dialect of Kant, moral freedom belongs only to the 
homo iwumcnon as distinguished from the hmno phcenomenon. The 
"actual man," it would appear, cuts a pitiful figure in presence of 
the demand made upon him by the Kantian ethics. 



DATA OF EELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS. 263 

dental," whicli holds that the object of belief is, as 
much as any external object of perception, a reality 
independent and (so to speak) outside of the mind 
which apprehends it. We have only to do, at pres- 
ent, with the latter. 

We might put the question, already stated, in 
another form, namely : " Are the objects of religious 
conviction — God, Freedom, Immortality — truths of 
reason ; or are they only the moods, or the reflections, 
of our experience ? " But this turn given to the ques- 
tion has the difficulty, that it introduces us to the 
phrases and the distinctions of philosophical schools, 
which are apt to be misleading. In particular, it is 
in danger of hiding from us the point at issue. The 
question we have raised is -not one of certitude, but 
of certainty ; not one of " truth," but of " fact." 

Again, in stating the question to ourselves, we find 
that we have to deal not merely with three objects of 
belief, but with three different orders of belief ; and 
that each of them is to be met by a different process 
from the rest. The same criterion will not apply to 
them all. One is the object of intellectual contem- 
plation or moral reverence ; one, of the special emo- 
tion of loyalty and obedience ; one, of that bold hope 
which will recognize no limit to the life that seems 
opening immeasurably before it. 

What we can possibly call proof, or evidence, from 
a given state of mind, will apply in very different 
measure to the three. Thus we may speak, accu- 
rately enough, of a " consciousness of God." We do 
speak with the strictest conceivable accuracy of a 
"consciousness of moral freedom." We can speak 



264 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 

only by a violent figure (as is often clone) of a " con- 
sciousness of immortality," — which means, if it 
means anything, consciousness now of endless fu- 
ture states of consciousness. Cicero's expression, 
"a fore-feeling" {prccsendo), is a much better expres- 
sion, and is perhaps the nearest approach we can 
make to a true account of that phase of experience. 
Strictly speaking, then, the conviction of immortality 
remains, as to its speculative ground, not a conscious 
knowledge but at best a fore-feeling or apprehension, 
— more probably a hope or dread, as the case may 
be. What we can be really conscious of is not the 
duration, but the quality, of the life we call spiritual. 
And the more intense our realizing of it, the more 
we shall find that the quality is a far more important 
matter than the duration. 

Moreover, when we deal with that deepest of re- 
ligious convictions, the Being of God, the answer we 
find will depend on the " attributes " or limitations 
we attach to that Name. If we mean by it (what 
many have found in it) simply an expression for 
the Universal Life, the consensus of all laws and 
forces, known or unknown, — then the existence of 
God is a self-evident truth. It is, in short, merely 
one term of an identical equation. It is a verbal 
definition which we are agreed beforehand to accept. 
Our intellectual assent may well enough be taken 
for granted. It only remains, by increase of know- 
ledge or play of imagination, to comprehend as best 
we may the universe of fact which we have embraced 
in our definition. 

But this " cosmic theism " (as it has been called) 



THE BEING OF CxOD. 265 

leaves out of sight precisely the one thing which 
makes the name of God venerable and dear to the 
religious feeling. The attribute of Holiness can have 
no possible meaning to our mind, unless it is set over 
against that which is unholy, base, profane. In other 
words, it reflects one mood of that moral conflict in 
which we find ourselves plunged as human beings. 
To such a mood the thought of God as the Absolute 

— which swallows up all distinctions, so that the 
hint of conflict is a contradiction in terms — brings 
no satisfaction : it is rather the keenest affront. To 
say that God is the source of all life, all force, is 
perfectly satisfying as a postulate of speculative 
theology. That poetic pantheism, that fair unmoral 
Paganism, fits well enough the wide and placid land- 
scape of mental contemplation. But when it comes 
to mean (as it must mean) not only that the germi- 
nating life and the law of social evolution are acts of 
God, but just as much the explosive force of dyna- 
mite, and the ferocity that would use it to wreck the 
social fabric ; the hideous disease alike with the heal- 
ing skill that fights it ; the crime and the criminal on 
exactly equal terms with the heroism and the saint, 

— then we find how worthless for any religious uses 
is that fine-sounding definition, after all The term 
" God " in this sense has only one advantage, that I 
can see, over " The Absolute " or " The Unknowable " 
or " Persistent Energy " or " Stream of Tendency," 

— that it is shorter, and easier to speak or spell. 
In one sense, then, — and that sense the deepest 

and most practical, — the interpretation given us in 
a cosmic theism (which is the best that speculative 



206 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 

theology alone can do) is not an interpretation that 
meets any religious need. It is seen to be not only 
independent, but even destructive, of that other co- 
ordinate term in the religious experience, the recog- 
nition of a Law of Holiness. The two are not only 
distinct, but hostile. The speculative Dualism which 
was once their way of reconciliation has always, since 
Augustine, been hateful to the Christian sense, and 
in the eye of any modern philosophy would be intol- 
erable. To many of the best and most serious minds 
it has therefore seemed unavoidable to throw up the 
speculative problem ; at least, to leave it for the play- 
thing of the understanding, not as hoping by its so- 
lution to cast light on the real business of life. Of 
the three elements, or data, of the religious conscious- 
ness, that central one, which declares the Law of 
Holiness (or the reality of moral obligation), has 
appeared to such minds the only one that can have 
a permanent religious value as a basis of scientific 
deduction or as an object of speculative tliought. 

This does not, however, mean that we forfeit or 
deny any object of our religious contemplation, rever- 
ence, awe, or hope. It only means that the problem 
of the Universe is too vast to be reduced witliin range 
of the speculative understanding. It means that any 
intellectual statement is worthless, which pretends to 
make the Infinite Intelligence, or its way of working, 
comprehensible to human thought. When we say 
that " the mind is free " in presence of the insoluble 
problem of the universe, we must necessarily mean 
not only the pious mind, but the secular, the scien- 
tific, the agnostic mind. Each will find its own 



THE LAW 01 HOLINESS. 267 

thought reflected, "as in a glass, darkly," in that 
strangely multiplying mirror which the Universe 
must always be to ns. 

And I do not see why we should be in the least 
anxious to prove a speculative theism, in the way in 
which that feat has usually been performed. After 
all, our best notion of that which is infinite and uni- 
versal must always be a sort of poetry. Who, or what, 
or how God is, can be spoken only in symbols to 
human thought. And in all our thought upon that 
matter we have to remember that the symbol is not 
the thing, — any more than when in the poetry of 
the Hebrews it was spoken of God's hands and feet 
and eyes and fingers. Our language, too, upon this 
topic is symbol, not science ; is poetry, not prose ; is 
song, not creed. 

Let us apply the same thought to the second ele- 
ment of the religious consciousness. God, we are 
told, — also in language of poetic symbol, — is " the 
Eternal, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness." 
Some metaphysicians say that there is no power, not 
ourselves, which makes for righteousness ; that good- 
ness, justice, mercy, love, are only thoughts, emotions, 
qualities, of our own souls. Still, let us not quarrel 
about the phrase. All such phrases are only hints 
and symbols of the fact. Of God outside of us — in 
the universe, in the realm of visible things — it is im- 
possible for us to know anything at all, except so far 
as we can see order, method, purpose, in the laws of 
Nature, in the processes of Evolution. It is that 
loithin us which makes for righteousness,- — or, in the 
Christian symbol, " the Word made flesh and dwell- 



2(38 SPECULATIVF THEOLOGY. 

iug among ns, full of grace and truth," — that alone 
gives us a true image or revelation of the God we 
really adore. That power " makes for righteousness," 
it is true. But it is by aiding us in the struggle with 
what we know is evil ; in the effort to estaljlish what 
we know is right. So, then, except we hold fast that 
fundamental distinction of Eight and Wrong, we can- 
not know anything truly about God ; we cannot even 
think of any God loorth knowing. Our conviction of 
this "element of the religious consciousness" may 
take the noblest form of intellectual statement, — 
that Infinite Good exists in the person of a Divine 
Will, sovereign, fatherly, gracious; but it is still "evi- 
dence of things not seen." The belief, so far forth as 
it is religious, is in One who " worketh in us, both to 
will and to do." 

All this does not help us in the least, so far as I 
can see, to what we may call a distinct speculative 
theism ; that is, to an understanding of the being and 
attributes of God, or of his way of working as a Con- 
scious Agent behind the phenomena of the universe. 
As to tliat, we are unable to see that the human mind 
has made any advance at all, since the days of the 
world's childhood. Except for the greater wealth of 
subject-matter contributed by science and the expe- 
rience of mankind, the speculations of the Stoics are 
exactly as good as the speculations of the Hegelians, 
and no better. 

If we were to be asked to give an intellectual expres- 
sion to our rf.ligious belief, doubtless we should not 
do it in the furm of Paley's argument for a Contriving 
Mind, or any expositions of the metaphysical Abso- 



THE SERVICE EENDERED. 269 

lute, or the scientist's demonstration of a Cosmic 
Theism. Either of these we may take for symbol, as 
far as they will go. But we might do better to go 
back even as far as the language of the Bible, which 
contains the frankest and noblest symbolism that has 
yet gone into human speech. This would be truer to 
us : not because it is clearer in argument than Paley, 
or nicer in metaphysical subtilties than Hegel, or 
more convincing than the processes of modern science ; 
but because it carries our thought by more lines of 
sacred association, and by a greater uplifting of the 
religious imagination, to that Universal Life, of which 
the truest thing we can say is, by a sublime personi- 
fication, this : that " in Him we live and move and 
have our being." 

But we cannot forget here the great service which 
Schleiermacher, and those who have worked in the 
same general direction with him, have done for the 
religious life of this latter time. The mere fact that 
for dogmatic theology they have substituted specu- 
lative theology, — that for a cruel and despotic Creed 
they have given us its insubstantial and harmless 
reflection in the mirror of Christian experience, — is 
a revolution such as the early Eeformers could never 
have dreamed of. It is all there : the Incarnation, the 
Trinity, the Atonement, Election, and the Judgment ; 
but as different from the menacing and imperious 
dogmas of the past as the fair reflection in a lake, 
or the bright landscape on canvas, is from the bleak 
precipices and horrible chasms of an Alpine range. 
In color and shape you could not tell the difference. 
That difference is in the lack of substance and of life. 



270 SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 

No mobs, like those at Ephesus, will fight for the 
honor of the spectral Second Person of this spectral 
Trinity. No fires, like those of Seville and Geneva, 
will be kindled to suppress the heresies that may as- 
sail the dim Phantasmagory. The dogma has become 
simply a fact of religious consciousness ; and, as such, 
a constituent part of modern philosophic thought. 
Here is its harmlessness ; for nobody is afraid of a 
reflection in a mirror. Here, too, is its security ; for 
nobody can hurt a shadow. 

The cliief service, however, is done, not by merely 
making the dogma harmless and spectral, but by 
linking modern forms of thought and experience with 
the old sanctities of the religious life. Those wonder- 
ful Triads which Coleridge borrowed (it is said) from 
Schelling, and took to be a sort of mystic Trinity, may 
seem to us, it is true, a mere play of words ; but they 
greatly widened the horizon of English thought, and 
led the way to a far larger and freer intellectual life 
among those whose narrow orthodoxy has been sub- 
limated into the rare ether of his transcendental 
speculation. The thin formularies which Cousin and 
his school of French Eclectics translated out of 
Hegel are already a little the worse for wear; but 
fifty years ago they were full of a kindling vigor for 
minds that had grown discontented with the narrow 
issues of the New England Unitarian controversy. 
And, of more value than either of these effects, it 
may well be believed that the most intelligent and 
vital piety in American or Scottish orthodoxy to-day 
is where its teachers have been, without knowing it, 
emancipated from the cramps of a sterile bigotry by 



EESULTS. 271 

the mellower and tenderer atmosphere of the German 
speculative theology. 

This result was the easier, because Schleiermacher 
was no bleak and arid metaphysician, but a man full 
of a sweet piety, a stead/ patriotism, a noble integ- 
rity, and moral earnestness. Historian, critic, scholar, 
theologian, his great function was to be the most 
eminent of preachers to the souls of his own people ; 
the tenderest of friends and counsellors to his nearer 
circle of friends. So that, with all his intellectual 
eminence, and his fame as a constructor of the new 
theology, it remains his true glory that he sought its 
foundations in his own experience, and that he made 
it a fresh testimony and help to the reality of the 
religious life. 



XI 
THE EEIGN OF LAW. 

UNIVEESAL Law, in the sense we give to 
that phrase, is a very modern notion. It is 
hardly more than two hundred years since the first 
completed step was taken towards that conception, in 
what we call the Law of Gravitation ; and it is not 
thirty, since that other great stride was made towards 
it, which we call the Law of Evolution. Especially, 
it is not till lately that we have come to see with 
some distinctness its bearings upon our religious 
thought. And it is from this point of view, not the 
purely scientific, that we have to regard it now. 

Practically, it is true, the regular sequences in 
Nature — such, as day and night, the change of sea- 
sons, the moon's phases, eclipses, and the like — have 
been known and acted on from a very early time; 
and the heavens have thus always been held as signs 
of a Cosmic or Divine Order, which could not be 
traced in things terrestrial. It is in this sense that 
they are said to " declare the glory of God," in the 
nineteenth Psalm, whose theme is the exaltation of 
" the Law of the Lord." This is all that is really 
meant in the famous paragraph of Hooker, in which 
he might at first sight seem to be speaking of what 
we mean by Universal Law : — 



273 



" Of Law there can be no less acknowledged than that 
her seat is in the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of 
the Avorld. All things in heaven and earth do her hom- 
age : the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as 
not exempted from her power. Both angels and men, 
and creatures of what condition soever, though each in 
different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent, 
admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy." 

These noble words follow a highly rhetorical pas- 
sage, which admits such suppositions as the follow- 
ing, which the scientific mind is wholly unable to 
conceive or entertain : — 

" If Nature should intermit her course, and leave alto- 
gether, though it were for a while, the observation of her 
own laws ; . . . if celestial spheres should forget their 
wonted motions, and by irregular volubility turn thein- 
selves any way as it might happen ; . . . if the moon 
should wander from her beaten way, the times and seasons 
of the year blend themselves by disordered and confused 
mixtures, the winds breathe out their last gasp, the clouds 
yield no rain, the earth be defective of heavenly influence, 
the fruits of the earth pine away, as children at the with- 
ered breasts of their mother, no longer able to yield them 
relief, — what would become of man himself, whom these 
things do now all serve 1 " 

The whole passage is, in short, a vigorous and 
splendid personification to magnify the glory of God 
as Sovereign, who holds as it were the planets in a 
leash, and by personal guidance and control keeps 
all things to their appointed track. The conception 
is as purely poetic, and as little modern, as that in 

18 



274 THE REIGN OF LAW. 

the fortieth chapter of Isaiah, or in the nineteenth 
Psalm. 

There is one great name in English literature, 
which is generally thought to stand for the first dis- 
tinct advance to the modern or scientitic view. But 
one who should look for this in Bacon would look in 
vain. He would find a great many fine and eloquent 
things, but no conception whatever of Law in its 
modern sense. Bacon had visions of what might be 
effected, in a utilitarian way, by turning men's minds 
from logical puzzles to discovery and experiment in 
the field of Nature; and he had a brilliant way of 
putting these visions to the imagination. But his 
motive is wholly that of a statesman, a man 'of letters, 
a theorist of restless, sagacious, and versatile intelli- 
gence. Of what we should call scientific contempla- 
tion — still more, of harmonizing the wider generali- 
zation with the conception of religious truth — he is 
wholly void and incapable. Intellectually, the task 
he sets about is " the Advancement of Learning ; " 
that is, of interesting and curious information. Prac- 
tically, his aim is to turn that knowledge to useful or 
delightful ends, — health, wealth, art, comfort. Ee- 
ligiously, he rather widens the gulf between what 
can be shown by the " dry light " of reason and what 
is assumed in the offices of faith. He even exagge- 
rates the paradoxes of his creed over against the 
plain teachings of the understanding. "Theology," 
he says, " is grounded only upon the word and oracle 
of God, and not upon the light of Nature." Most of 
his " New Organon " consists in emptying upon the 
page the contents of a commonplace-book, gathered 



BACON. — GALILEO. 275 

with curious and painstaking industry, intersiDersed 
with vivacious and penetrating hints, and illuminated 
here and there by phrases and figures that have 
stamped themselves upon the speech of the world. 
His mind was as completely shut to the great work 
of positive science going on in his day as it was to 
the religious and moral forces then at the heart of 
English life. He refused to accept the Copernican 
system of the heavens. Although he recommended 
vivisection, he believed notliiug, or cared nothing, 
about Harvey's great discovery of the circulation of 
the blood. He seems never to have heard of the 
revolutionary work in experimental physics then 
going on in the Italian schools. To employ his own 
phrase, no man living in his day was more completely 
than he subject to " Idols of the Market " and " Idols 
of the Theatre." If Goethe ever said that " Bacon 
drew a sponge over human knowledge," — in the 
sense that he led the way in a revolution of thought 
on the higher matters of contemplation, — it is not . 
likely that Goethe ever read him. 

That revolution of thought was going on, exactly 
contemporaneous with Bacon's brilliant career in pol- 
itics and letters, under the patient and ingenious labors 
of a very different class of minds. In 1602 Galileo 
demonstrated by his experiments that falling bodies 
pass through space with a motion uniformly accel- 
erated. This established two facts, which we may 
regard as the first steps towards the conception of 
natural law in its strict modern sense ; namely, that 
such bodies are acted on constantly by a uniform 
force of some sort (known as " terrestrial gravita- 



276 THE REIGN OF LAW 

tion") drawing them that way; and that the spaces 
they traverse will be " directly as the squares of the 
times " through which they fall. 

What made this step a revolutionary one was, that 
for the first time a numerical ratio was clearly estab- 
lished between the two elements of time and space 
concerned in the experiment. This signal achieve- 
ment was the key by which, it is not too much to 
say, the path of modern scientific discovery — mean- 
ing by this the discovery of law, not merely of fact 
— was opened to the human mind. It was the veri- 
fying of a, new method; and so was of far higher 
intellectual value than those discoveries and verifica- 
tions of fact which Galileo made a few years later 
(1610), in his observations of the phases of Venus 
and the satellites of Jupiter, and which appealed so 
much more quickly to the common imagination. 

Again, at the same time with Galileo's experi- 
ments, Kepler was demonstrating, by his ingenious 
and patient analysis, the true paths of the heavenly 
bodies. It was in 1609 that he "led Mars captive to 
the foot of Kodolph's throne," having triumphantly 
established tliose two out of the three " Laws of 
Kepler," which alone concern us now; namely, that 
the true path of the planet is an ellipse, having the 
sun in one of the foci; and that "the radius vector 
describes equal areas in equal times," — in other 
words, the nearer the planet is to the sun the faster 
it goes. Here, again, is a most important numerical 
ratio established between the apparently independent 
conditions of space and time ; and it was in consid- 
eration of the transcendent importance of this as a 



TERRESTRIAL GRAVITATION. 277 

step in the progress of human thought, not in vain 
exultation at having discovered a barren fact, that he 
uttered the famous boast, that he might well wait a 
generation for readers, since God himself had waited 
six thousand years for an interpreter.* 

The physical theories of Descartes, based on purely 
geometrical conceptions, fill up the next half-century 
in the history of science after Kepler's death ; but 
— with immense advances in method, and with such 
interesting discoveries in detail as those of Torricelh 
and Pascal before spoken of f — no great step had as 
yet been taken towards defining the conception ol 
Universal Law. It was surmised, indeed, that tht 
same force of gravitation, established by experiments 
on falling bodies, might hold good in the heavens 
and even the law of the diminution of its force Id 
the ratio of the square of the distance — so that & 
body twice as far from the earth's centre would 
weigh only one fourth as much — had been pretty 
confidently maintained as theory. So that the work 
done by Newton, in 1682, in establishing the theory 
of universal gravitation, was by no means (what is 
sometimes popularly supposed) a happy guess, con- 
firmed by later observations. It was a careful and 
patient induction, bringing to a decisive test what 

* It is curious to remember, in connection with this great step 
in positive science, that it was Kepler who cast the horoscope for 
the imperial but superstitious Wallenstein. "Nature," said he, 
" who has bestowed on every creature the means of subsistence, has 
given Astrology as an adjunct and ally to Astronomy." It may be 
well here to recall that Galileo was but tliree years, and Kepler ten 
years, younger than their great contemporary Bacon. 

t See above, p. 113. 



278 THE REIGN OF LAW. 

bad before seemed bopelessly out of tbe reach of 
any proof ; and, as before, the test is that of accurate 
mathematical ratio. 

What is necessary in order to explain the method 
Newton followed in his discovery, with sufficient 
accuracy for the general student of thought, can be 
told in a few words. Suppose the law of gravitation 
already taught by Galileo to hold good to an indefi- 
nite distance from the earth ; and suppose the moon 
to be (which in fact she pretty nearly is) sixty times 
as far from the earth's centre as we are upon its 
surface, — it will follow that she falls, or is drawn, 
towards the earth in a minute as far as a stone would 
fall in a second ; that is, sixteen feet. If at this 
moment she were to " go oft* on a tangent," in an hour 
she would be as much farther from the earth than 
her proper orbit, as a stone would fall through free 
space in a minute, — that is to say, about ten miles 
and a half. In two hours she would have been 
deflected four times as much ; that is, about forty- 
two miles. Now the moon goes round the earth 
once in about twenty-seven days — that is, one 
degree in rather less than two hours — with a radius 
of about two hundred and forty thousand miles ; and 
a table of " angular functions " enables us to calcu- 
late in a moment the distance she actually " falls," or 
is deflected, in that time. This is, in fact, almost 
exactly the distance just supposed, of forty-two miles. 
Taken in this rough way, the figures do not corre- 
spond quite closely enough to prove the theory. But 
the correspondence is near enough, for our present 
purpose, to illustrate the method of demonstration on 



NEWTON. 279 

which Newton relied.* The process, so far, was very- 
simple ; and it is not likely it cost him one tenth the 
mental labor which he spent on his splendid experi- 
ments in Optics. 

That Newton himself was well aware of the intel- 
lectual revolution implied in this great step of dis- 
covery is shown in two very interesting points of his 
biography, one of them first made clear (I believe) in 
his " Life " by Sir David Brewster. He • had shaped 
the theory, in this general way, in a vacation-season 
in 1666, when he left London to avoid the plague 5 
and spending the summer in the country, he saw 
(what was very likely a rare sight to him) the fall 
of a real apple from a real tree, which, it is said, set 
him to reflecting. But the distance of the moon can 
only be known, indirectly, when we know the size of 
the earth first ; and as this had been very imper- 
fectly measured in those days (Newton assuming 
sixty miles, instead of nearly seventy, for the length 
of a degree), his figures would not fit. So, with 
wonderful modesty and patience, he laid aside his 
calculations, as if they had no further nse. But in 
1682, after waiting more than sixteen years, he heard 

* The "natural secant" of one degree, after subtracting the 
radius, is 0.000152, which gives, with sufficient accuracy, the result 
above stated {i. e., 36.48 miles, to which one ninth should be 
added, as the lunar revolution is twenty-seven days, and not thirty). 
This result, multiplied by the squares 4, 9, 16, may be easily fol- 
lowed up for a series of 2, 3, and 4 degrees in the moon's motion. 
Newton's own statement, with the figures he used, is given in the 
Third Book of the Principia, Prop. iv. Theor. 4. 

A most instructive view of the steps by which Astronomy advanced 
from scattered observations to the compreliension of universal law is 
given in Whewell's " Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences." 



280 THE REIGN OF LAW. 

that more accurate measurements of the length of a 
degree had been made in France. He now took his 
papers from their place ; he examined the figures 
again ; and then, as the approximation drew closer 
and closer, he fell into a great trembling, and gave 
over the calculation to a friend, who easily completed 
the final steps. We, too, if we try to bring back the 
fact as it was then, may well share the profound 
awe of that emotion. For, indeed, it was one of the 
solemn moments of human history. It must have 
seemed to him as if at that one instant be were in 
contact with the very Life of things ; as if, to use 
Kepler's phrase, he were just then "thinking the 
thoughts of God ! " 

For Newton's mind was reverent and humble ; and 
he was quick, both to himself and to the world, to 
give a religious meaning to his conception of univer- 
sal law. This is contained in the celebrated " Gen- 
eral Scholium " at the end of his Principia : — 

" This most admirable {elegantissinva) system of Sun, 
planets, and comets could not have arisen except by the 
contrivance and command of an intelligent and mighty 
Being. ... He rules all, not as Soul of the World, but as 
Lord of the Universe. . . . The Supreme God is a Being 
eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect ; but, without dominion, 
a Being, however perfect, is not the Lord God. . . . From 
his actual dominion it follows, that the true God is living, 
intelligent, and mighty. He is eternal, infinite, almighty, 
and all-knowing." 

In an age of ever so rapid and brilliant discoveries 
of fact, it is of still far higher intellectual interest to 
watch the slow and painful evolution of an Idea. It 



WHAT IS LAW? 281 

is not too much to say that the very notion men have 
of natural law underwent a slow revolution, as they 
came to understand the meaning and reach of New- 
ton's great discovery. For, to the scientific mind. Law 
is not only the most general expression of a fact : it 
is also the expression of an ultimate fact. It is only 
by a figure of speech — it is, in fact, by a misconcep- 
tion of the idea — that we sometimes hear it said 
that " Law implies a Lawgiver ; " and so, that it is fur- 
ther proof of the existence of God. Unless the exist- 
ence of God is taken for granted first, the contem- 
plation of Law has even, as we constantly see in the 
history of science, a distinct effect to draw the mind 
away from any thought of Him. 

In the purely scientific sense, the first notion we 
get of Law is that which we find in certain sequences 
of numbers, and in the truths of geometry. But no 
one supposes that a law has been appointed to deter- 
mine that the differences of consecutive squares shall 
always increase by two, or that the three angles of a 
triangle shall always equal two right angles. Py- 
thagoras is said to have sacrificed a hundred oxen 
in gratitude for the discovery of the " forty-seventh 
proposition;" but it was to the Power not that had 
decreed the fact, but that had given him intelligence 
to understand the fact. 

Now the last and highest generalizations of science 
always tend to figure themselves in our mind both as 
ultimate and as necessary facts. Newton himself is 
wholly baffled in the attempt to state to himself a 
possible cause of gravitation : hypotheses non Jingo, he 
declares, in speaking of it. To him it is simply, as 



282 THE EEIGN OF LAW, 

we have seen, " an act of God." Once vigorously 
conceived, any denial of these generalizations, or the 
imagination of anything different, becomes as impos- 
sible as to think of a triangle whose angles should 
make more or less than two right angles. It is 
important to see, at the outset, this meaning in what 
we call universal law. It does not forbid us to hold 
jbhe purely religious conception of a Power, or a Life, 
beyond or above the realm of natural Law. But it 
does forbid us to think of the law itself as in any 
sense arbitrary or repealable. It compels us, with the 
present limitation of our powers, to regard the law 
as (so far as it goes) an expression of the ultimate 
constitution of things ; as an eternal Attribute (if 
we may express it so) of whatever we mean by the 
phrase " Eternal Being." 

It cannot be denied that this view is in violent 
conflict with those opinions about the Divine Life 
which have generally been thought essential to piety. 
We are greatly helped, therefore, if we would see the 
matter just as it is, by the fact that the revolution 
of thought involved in Newton's grand generalization 
had to do with a sphere of being quite out of men's 
reach, which had always been regarded as cosmic and 
eternal ; and that it has long been accepted with per- 
fect acquiescence — nay, with devout expansion and 
joy — by the most religious minds, as a positive help 
in their pious contemplation of the universe. So 
the sober English mind accepted it from the first. 
Theologians like Clarke, trained in Newton's Physics, 
were for applying his method at once to the solution 
of the profoundest problems in speculative theology. 



THE COSMIC ORDER. 283 

Critics like Bentley sought Newton's correspondence, 
so as to make clearer to their own minds their con- 
ceptions of fundamental truth. Addison wrote his 
melodious Hymn under the immediate inspiration of 
the Newtonian physics. And it was, no doubt, with 
the applause of the polite companies who listened to 
his brilliant talk, that Young wrote, in his senten- 
tious verse, 

" An undevout Astronomer is mad." 

But there is a class of minds, to which the very 
precision of the scientific view seems to take away 
the halo of a great glory from their contemplation of 
the universe. Astronomers tell us there is nothing 
so fine to be seen through their telescopes as what we 
see for ourselves every clear night with the naked 
eye.* The heavens have always been, to the com- 
mon mind, a free range for poetry and fancy, and 
the abode of a very idealized but intensely real life. 
As the older mythologies faded out of them, their 
place was filled by the crystalline celestial spheres, 
such as we find in Dante, which made a vivid and 
sacredly cherished article of Mediaeval faith. In the 
earlier invasions of astronomy, so long as the con- 
ception of Force was absent, the very intricacy and 
perfection of the celestial geometry might seem all 
the more to demand a Divine Pilot to guide those 
splendid luminaries in their vast orbits, in their 
unfailing periods. Kepler was not so illogical as he 
may appear to us, when he clung to the notion that 
Astrology might, after all, be a sort of handmaid to 
Astronomy. 

* See Seaiie's Outlines of Astronomy, p. 207. 



284 THE REIGN OF LAW. 

Even the vast sweep of the Cartesian " vortices " 
might seem to need the intelligent interposition of 
a guiding Hand to keep them uniform, untroubled, 
and strong. Leibnitz (who was four years younger 
than Newton) remained better content with that way 
of explaining things ; and we may suppose that it 
was quite as much from an honest conservative ap- 
prehension of the revolution coming to pass in the 
higher thought as from personal jealousy of a rival 
fame, when in his private correspondence he warned 
the Princess Caroline * of the religious consequences 
that would be sure to follow from the new Celestial 
Mechanics. His deep sagacity foresaw that the time 
would come when it should no longer be said that 
" the lieavens declare the glory of God ; " but that (as 
Comte puts it) " they declare the glory of Hipparchus, 
of Kepler, and of Newton ! " 

In fact, Newton's own conception — of " tangential 
motion " having been given at first, outright, to the 
planets,-|- which were thereafter to be controlled by 
the central attraction of the Sun — gave way in course 
of time to the " nebular hypothesis " of Laplace, who 
showed very clearly how shape, as well as motion, 
could be given to the Solar System by that universal 
force acting freely on an irregularly diffused body of 
nebulous matter in the open sky. Less than forty 
years ago religious thinkers were still struggling with 
that new conception, and considering how it might 

* Afterwards the Queen Caroline of " Tlie Heart of Midlothian." 
t He himself says that he cannot conceive of this tangential 
motion having been given except by the direct act of Deity. (Let- 
ter to Dr. Bentley.) 



CHEMISTRY : DALTON. 285 

possibly be held along with any theistic faith.* 
That little ruffle of controversy is almost forgotten 
now ; and, for a generation at least, all thinking 
minds have become wonted to the idea that the 
heavens are controlled, to all intents and purposes, 
by universal, unvarying, and impersonal Law. And 
the same may be said of " the uniformity of cosmic 
forces " through incalculable periods of time, as 
shown in the science of Geology, — which, in this 
regard, is simply a portion, or a sequel, of physical 
Astronomy. 

In the century and a half of physical discovery 
and widening generalization that has followed since 
Newton's death, it is not necessary to point out the 
single steps which mark the cardinal dates of the 
revolution.! There is only one which, though in a 
far obscurer sphere, appears to involve consequences 
equally radical and far-reacliing with those of New- 
ton's great discovery. This is Dalton's law of Defi- 
nite Proportions and Elective Affinities in Chemistry. 
It is not quite so well adapted for popular illustra- 
tion as tJie sublime generalizations of Astronomy. 
But, if we will think of it a moment, it carries the 
thought of guiding Intelligence still more intimately 
and deeply into the constitution of things. 

As we know now, most of the differences we find 
among objects — in color, texture, weight, and other 
apparent properties — depend on numerical propor- 
tions (measured by so-called " atomic weights " ) 

* 111 the "Christian Examine!'" of 1845, Dr. Lanison admitted 
that the nebular liypothesis " is not necessarily atheistic " ! 

t These are brieiiy rehearsed in "Our Liberal Movement," pp. 
192, 193. 



286 THE REIGN OF LAW. 

among the two, three, or more so-called " elements " 
of which they are made up. And w^hen we go over 
into organic chemistry, we find the same thing hold- 
ing good, though with such amazing intricacies and 
complexities of proportion as to baffle us completely, 
when we try to think what must be that synthesis, 
or stable equilibrium among them, which we call 
Life. 

It will be convenient then, for our present pur- 
pose, to keep ourselves to what is most simple and 
familiar. The " symbols " of chemistry are perfectly 
easy to understand, and tliose of any consequence to 
us are very few. Moreover, for the uses of our argu- 
ment, we need have nothing to do with the more 
difficult and staggering conceptions of " the new 
chemistry," * with the strange theories of " molecular 
physics," -f- or with the troublesome nomenclature 
invented to describe the higher orders of compounds. 
It is not with the encycloptedia of facts in any 
science, but only with one or two of its fundamen- 
tal truths, that we have to deal, if we would trace 
its bearings in other fields of thought, motive, or 
belief 

Now, if we look attentively at one of the very 
simplest chemical phenomena, — say the reactions 
which take place when we pour vitriol upon chalk, 
— we find that the base (lime) instantly and ener- 
getically elects the sulphuric acid, rejecting the car- 
bonic in the form of gas, and turning into quite 

* Sucli as tlie swift and incessant movements of the molecules of 
vapor. 

t Such as Helmholtz's " vortical rings." 



ELECTIVE AFFINITY. 287 

another substance (gypsum). Why ? Only (it would 
seem) because such is its own " elective affinity," — 
carried out, too, with an infallible accuracy of meas- 
ure and proportion, which in human acts would show 
a high though strictly limited order of intelligence. 

We find, in a different example, that four elements 
in solution, two from each of the substances em- 
ployed, have rushed eagerly, and with unerring sa- 
gacity, crosswise into a new arrangement ; * each 
forsaking its former partner, and combining, in some 
haste and violence, with the other, the new com- 
pound having hardly a single property in common 
with the old. 

There is, so far as we can see, no external force to 
compel them to this, and none to direct them in it. 
All depends on what we call the " properties " of the 
ingredients themselves. The thing we note, with 
constantly deepening wonder and surprise, is that 
the process is one of unfailing and (seemingly) abso- 
lute intelligence in each of the constituents, within 
its own narrow sphere of action. Of the elements 
concerned in the experiment we know absolutely 
nothing (beyond their atomic weights and a few 
simple properties), except that they are liable to 
such escapades as these, with resulting qualities and 
effects which in some degree we have ascertained be- 
forehand and can determine. Of the process itself 

* This is easily illustrated by pouring together a clear solution 
of nitrate of silver and of chloride of sodium (common salt). A 
chalk-white nia.ss of chloride of silver instantly falls to the bottom, 
and what remains in solution is nitrate of sodium (soda-saltpetre), 
which is then crystallized by evaporation. 



288 THE REIGN OF LAW. 

we know absolutely nothing, except that it results 
from the (apparently) free choice, the " elective affin- 
ities," whicli may exist among these bodies, so that 
without external constraint they take one in prefer- 
ence to another ; and that there is infallible precision 
in determining, by " definite proportions," the quanti- 
ties in which they will mingle. It would require 
the most scrupulous care of the most skilful chemist 
to weigh them out with anything like the intelligent 
accuracy they show of themselves, as soon as the 
opportunity is offered them. 

Here again, on the minutest and most intricate 
scale, as before on the broadest and most sublime, 
we come upon the universal Intelligence which 
makes tlie cosmic order, shown in the same way, of 
accurate numerical ratio, — not, this time, between 
elements of time and space, but between " atomic 
weiglits," that is, different and independent manifes- 
tations of force. And if anything could deepen the 
awe with which we stand in presence of this ulti- 
mate fact, or cosmic law of things, it would be that 
we live in a world made up of such compounds, — 
in equilibrium stable enough to give us innumerable 
substances solid and familiar to our handling ; but 
unstable enough to show how, under conditions some- 
what different, but perfectly conceivable, they might 
all fly away in vapor, or else build for us "new 
heavens and a new earth," wildly remote from any- 
thing we have seen or known. 

To complete the conception just given in the 
sphere of chemistry, we need to look at it from two 
opposite points of view, one of them sliowing it in 



FACTS OF PHYSIOLOGY. 289 

the range of cosmic immensity, the other in the in- 
tricacy of vital processes. 

We should take on the one hand the revelations 
of the spectroscope as to the light of sun, stars, and 
nebulse. This order of discovery simply means, to 
us, that the elements of which the heavenly bodies 
are composed would be subject, under similar condi- 
tions, to precisely the same chemical reactions which 
we are continually reproducing in our experiments. 
Thus we find, in chemistry as well as in astronomy 
and mechanics, the exhibition not only of terrestrial 
but of universal law. 

On the other hand, we should try to realize to our- 
selves some of the conceptions of modern physiology. 
And here we find that we are quite unconsciously 
bearing about in our bodily structure a laboratory of 
enormous power, which with an energy of chemical 
action we can noway conceive is turning out every 
day four or five gallons of its highly elaborated com- 
pounds. We find a pailful of hot blood rushing, as 
fast as a strong man walks, through innumerable 
arteries and veins, propelled by a muscle weighing 
less than a pound, that shall not pause a single sec- 
ond in its energetic contractions and expansions, for 
a lifetime of more than eighty years. We find a 
chemistry of digestion so potent as — by the aston- 
ishing solvent which it brews daily to the amount of 
one-tenth the weight of the entire body — in a few 
hours to change the beggar's crust and the epicure's 
banquet of fifty flavors into the same indistinguish- 
able vital fluid. We find an electric battery to do 
our thinking by, made up of more than twelve hun- 

19 



290 THE REIGN OF LAW. 

dred million cells connected by five thousand mil- 
lion filaments of nerve. We find all this stupendous 
apparatus undergoing every day a process of slow 
burning down and building up, measured in part by 
the muscular, mental, and emotional force put fortli, 
but far the greater part by the vital heat developed 
in the destruction of its tissues, and the astonishing 
creative or building process by which they are re- 
newed from day to day. 

All the phenomena thus grouped in the widening 
circles of our knowledge, the scientific mind comes 
to regard as simple facts, as ultimate facts. We 
are as little capable of imagining to ourselves the 
method of operation of the superior Power which 
has brought them into being, acting (as it were) from 
the outside, as we are of creating them outright our- 
selves. To pretend to " account " for them amounts 
simply to giving that Power a name, and so to save 
our.selves the trouble of thinking, by refusing to see 
the blank mystery which it involves. 

As John Stuart Mill has said, the argument from 
the intelligence and skill seen throughout tliis world 
of wonders is, after all, the best proof we have of the 
existence of a God. To deny intelligent design in 
the universe is like denying sunshine in the land- 
scape : it stares us in the face everywhere. But, as 
he further shows, this argument is beset by so many 
moral difficulties, as soon as we follow it into detail, 
that it has little or no religious value. We may 
even say that — so far as any value of that sort is 
considered — the logic of final causes had better not 
be studied too closely, except by a religious mind. 



PHYSICAL AND MOR-AL ORDER. 291 

That is, as Bacon might say, the Medusa which has 
turned many a living man to stone. The scientific 
motive is, after all, a good deal safer than the teleo- 
logical. And this is, simply to ascertain the facts, 
with the " laws of similitude and succession " that 
can be established among them ; and, having done 
this, to regard them as ultimate and (in any philo- 
sophical sense) unaccountable. 

We have thus, both in the cosmic order of the 
heavens and in the bodily condition^^ of human life, 
come to take frankly the view whiclb. sees in them 
the working out of universal law. In what concerns 
the higher life of humanity — inteJlect, emotion, 
spiritual beliefs, and historic evolution — we do not 
as yet seem to see traces of the sanip- unvarying 
order. The nearest we have come to that is in as- 
certaining the physiological conditions under which 
we think and feel ; but it would be begging the 
whole philosophical question if we should assume 
that these conditions produce, or in fact do anything 
more than limit and qualify, the higher mental and 
moral activities we are conscious of. And the ques- 
tion which remains is. Whether, or how far, these 
ranges of our life may be taken in and comprehended 
under the same universal Order which wtJ recognize 
in the domain of physics. 

Speculatively, we should say at once tl^at they can. 
And from the point of view of pure speculation 
there has never, in fact, been any doub^ Whether 
an eternal Necessity, or a Divine Decrevi, or a, scien- 
tific Determinism, or a doctrine of univ!3rsal Evolu- 
tion, the presumption is still in favor fA" fba same 



292 THE REIGN OF LAW. 

invariable and unalterable sequence, in all ranges of 
being, absolutely without exception. If logical con- 
sistency were all, the case stops here. 

But logical consistency is not scientific proof The 
assertion of laM' — that is, absolute uniformity of 
sequence — within a given sphere is purely an hy- 
pothesis, until it is verified by certain tests. The 
chief of these tests, perhaps the only valid ones, are 
these two, — prediction and control. The final proof 
of the law of gravitation prevailing throughout the 
Solar System was considered to have been given 
when, in 1846, Leverrier made the prediction which 
was verified by the discovery of Neptune. Hitherto, 
the law had explained all the known phenomena ; 
now, it predicted one that was unknown and unsus- 
pected. If the weather could be predicted in like 
manner, we should know that we had the true law 
of atmospheric changes. In both these cases the 
phenomena are out of our reach, and accurate predic- 
tion is our only test. In such matters as chemistry, 
we submit the case in hand to our experiments ; we 
reproduce the conditions, as well as we can, in our 
laboratory; and only when we can say with confi- 
dence that we can produce certain results, do we 
know that we have the law. 

This test is what makes the difference between a 
scientific truth and a mere accumulation of facts ob- 
served and registered, which (for example) geology 
was so long ; or a probable generalization from an 
immense number of observations, which is the con- 
dition of tlie Darwinian theory to-day. The process 
of the genesis of species by natural evolution, and 



COMTE. 293 

even by way of natural selection, is made (it may 
be) increasingly probable ; but it is only rhetorically 
that we can speak of it as a law. Of two inconceiv- 
ables, one seems less inconceivable than the other. 
In these departments of science the larger and the 
lesser ranges of observation may do much to help 
each other out. Still, no one, except Avithin very 
narrow limits, is able to predict the facts, and no 
one is able to control the facts. We can only estab- 
lish a probable sequence among the facts. 

I have tried to state that conception of what makes 
scientific certainty, which is necessary in order to 
judge fairly the work done just here by Auguste 
Comte. Now Comte was a man of great eccentric- 
ities and of peculiar limitations. He had strictly 
marked out the limits within which he considered 
that he could work to advantage ; and (except in his 
professional department of mathematics) he banished 
from his thought, as far as he could, everything out- 
side those limits. Thus he was scornfully intolerant 
of the waste of force (as he regarded it) in theologi- 
cal contemplation, or the insoluble problems of meta- 
physics, — which have been and still are some of 
the noblest exercises of human thought. He was 
irritated and impatient that science should not keep 
within its proper "beat" of the Solar System, and 
had an active antipathy to stellar astronomy, — 
which we see now to be the finest range of specula- 
tive physics. He had an ignorant contempt of pake- 
ontology, as savoring of barren inquiry into the origin 
of things, — which proves, since his day, to be tlie 
most fruitful study of embryology on the grandest 



294 THE REIGN OF LAW. 

scale. That infinitely skilful and patient working up 
from first principles, through molecular physics into 
the ranges of organic life, so splendid and impres- 
sive in Herbert Spencer's philosophy of Evolution, 
he not only knew nothing about, from the fact of its 
coming up since his day, but he would most likely 
have repudiated it angrily as " materialism ; " that is, 
as turning men's thoughts to the inferior levels, away 
from those laws and constructions of human society 
which to him made the only fit or pardonable goal of 
" positive philosophy." 

Besides, it is not with impunity that one shuts 
himself up, as he did, in an intellectual hermitage 
for twenty years. Grant that it was the necessary 
condition on which one indispensable task could be 
done, and so that he was justified in imposing it on 
himself. Still, that long solitary confinement must 
have its ill effect in a morbid irritability, an intoler- 
ant dogmatism, an inordinate conceit of the work he 
had to do, verging on insanity, and making him at 
length soberly regard himself as the high-priest of 
a new " Eeligion of Humanity," and the Supreme 
Pontiff of mankind.* 

In dealing with a singularly massive and domi- 
nating intelligence, like that of Comte, it seems best 
to admit at the outset those limitations and faults, 
which have created even a bitter prejudice against 
his name among most men of science, and which are 
too abundantly illustrated both in his autobiograph- 

* I visited M. Comte three times in Paris, in the summer of 
1855, and have given such personal impressions and recollections as 
seemed worth noting in the "Christian Exanuner" of July, 1857. 



COMTE. 295 

ical prefaces, and in the details of his biography. 
Having made these very damaging admissions, it 
remains true that his is, unquestionably, by far the 
greatest personal force that has gone into the scien- 
tific thought of the century; and that his name is 
significant, before every other, of the intellectual rev- 
olution which we are passing through. It must be 
left for the exceedingly vigorous and intelligent school 
of his professed disciples to vindicate this judgment in 
detail. My own purpose will be met, more briefly and 
simply, by pointing out those characteristics, of his 
work which lie in the line of my general argument. 
It will be shown, I think, that in the particular path 
he took he does not come into comparison or compe- 
tition with those eminent scientists who have given 
special glory to this time ; while his true work is in 
the purely intellectual comprehension of what we 
mean by Universal Law. 

The work, then, to be properly credited to Comte 
has been done, not in the gathering and classifying of 
scientific facts, as to which he is relatively weak. It 
has been done by keeping steadily in view the largest 
generalizations of science, and so helping in its intel- 
lectual interpretation. In particular — sooner, more 
firmly, and more consistently than any other eminent 
thinker — he conceived and held that interpretation 
of Law which Newton held, though waveringly, in 
the line of the liigher physics, and which has been 
established with such difficulty and so recently on 
the plane of physiology. I do not say that his con- 
ception of it is final, or is satisfactory. With that 
argument, as yet, I have nothing to do. But that 



296 THE REIGN OF LAW. 

notion which he aimed to fix and make clear in his 
title, " Positive Philosophy," must be conceived as 
clearly and firmly as he has stated it, in order to 
make any further step in the interpretation of nature 
possible. 

This conception, in the form he has given it, was 
lodged in his mind (as such dominating germ-thoughts 
are wont to be) by a sudden act of reflection or intu- 
ition, or what at any rate seemed so. It was when 
he was not far from the age of twenty. The prob- 
lem, as it presented itself, was — in the line of widest 
generalization — to find the law of evolution in the 
field of pure intelligence, both philosophic (the indi- 
vidual consciousness) and historic (the consciousness 
of mankind at large). To work up from physiologi- 
cal data, as the strict evolutionist would do, would 
be to falsify the conditions of the problem as he 
understood them. Physical data may serve for phy- 
sics ; but in the field of thought we must have those 
which are purely intellectual. 

The law which he announced — which announced 
itself to hiin, we may say, in the course of twenty- 
four hours' strained and unremitting bent of thought 
— we shall very likely find crude and vague ; at all 
events, most of the criticisms of it have proceeded 
upon a very crude and vague understanding of what 
it implies. It is commonly called " the law of the 
three states," or stages of mental progress. Its mean- 
ing is something like this : that the highest general 
conceptions which men are able to attain will be at 
first Theological, ascribing phenomena to direct acts 
of will, — either in the thing itself (fetichism), groups 



COMTE. 297 

of divine po\vers (polytheism), or a single controlling 
mind (monotheism) ; then Metaphysical, accounting 
for phenomena by general principles or abstractions, 
— as attraction, repulsion, caloric, electric fluid, vital 
force, and the like, — which we see presently to be 
merely disguising the unknowable under a preten- 
tious name; and finally Positive, in which the most 
comprehensive fact we can attain in any group of 
facts, the " law of similitude and succession " of that 
order of phenomena, stands to the mind as an ulti- 
mate fact, — any attempt whatever to explain or 
account for it (except by comprehending it under 
some larger generalization) being necessarily barren 
and futile. 

Now this law (as he regarded it) would be not 
only crude and vague, but manifestly false, unless it 
were combined with, and used to interpret, what- 
Comte calls the " hierarchy of the sciences," — that 
is, the series of generalized facts, or large scientific 
inductions, in the order in which they yield to the 
forementioned law. 

Here, again, it is necessary to say that the motive 
is not to give the most complete or serviceable 
schedule, as Mr. Spencer appears to assume in com- 
menting upon it in his "Classification of the Sci- 
ences." One takes the point of view of intellectual 
contemplation, and the other of objective relation. 
Each is best for its own purpose. We need not try 
to judge betM'een them, as Mr. Mill does, who decides 
that Comte's is on the whole the better scheme. 
At any rate it is the simpler. And it is perfectly 
clear, in the history of the sciences, that these have 



298 THE REIGN OF LAW. 

emerged into the " positive stage " of interpretation 
in the order in which he gives them. This order is 
as follows : pure and applied Mathematics, Astrono- 
my, Physics (heat, light, electricity). Chemistry, and 
Biology, The law of development in the intellectual 
history of mankind is exhibited, by way of illustra- 
tion, in this series ; but his treatment of the sciences 
themselves is only a preliminary, or by-play, to the 
work which Comte really means to do. 

It was for the sake of this work that he shut him- 
self up (as we may say) in that intellectual hermit- 
age, and for nearly twenty years — from twenty-five 
to forty-five — made himself voluntarily a stranger 
to the advance of science and to all contemporary 
literature, whether of thought or art. The great 
price which this seclusion cost him, intellectually 
and morally, I have before spoken of. It was the 
price that had to be paid for what is perhaps the 
most massive, luminous, and instructive survey ever 
given of the intellectual development of mankind, — 
meaning by that, as he explains, the most advanced 
of tlie populations of Western Europe ; those who 
have inherited all the past had to give, and who 
control the forces that will shape the future desti- 
nies of the liuman race. 

It is an exposition that has its limitations of a too 
imperfect knowledge, since after the age of thirty 
Comte ceased to learn ; and of a too dogmatic theory, 
since he carried into the interpretation all tliat liard 
orderliness which marked the style of Catholic dog- 
ma, and since the Catholic system always stood to 
him as the type of that intellectual and moral Order 



comte's religion of humanity. 299 

which we must seek to realize, on penalty of perpet- 
ual revolution and social chaos. 

A better knowledge of the facts, or one from a dif- 
ferent point of view, would probably show that his 
notion of the Middle Age is excessively idealized ; 
and that he is as unjust as he is stiff in the Catholic 
prejudice, which views the whole Eeformation move- 
ment as outside the lines of progress, or a mere plun- 
ging into the chaos of metaphysics. But if we take 
him for suggestion, not for dogma, there shall hardlj' 
be found anywhere an equally instructive view ; while 
the parallel chapters on the intellectual disintegration 
and the scientific reconstruction of the modern era, 
are essays of almost unequalled breadth, fertility, and 
power.* 

I have but a word to say here of the so-called 
"Eeligion of Humanity," which was the dream of 
Comte's later years. It has been treated by the 
majority of its critics with quite undeserved con- 
tempt, but with still more unpardonable ignorance. 
Grant that the attempt is absurd, even grotesque, 
to restore the forms of Medicevalism under modern 
conditions; that a scientific priesthood would be as 
mischievous to mankind as an ecclesiastical one ; 
that Eenan's nightmare of pessimism is merely the 
reverse side of Comte's sacerdotal dream. Still, the 
absurdity is harmless, and the mischief is one there 
is no danger of. That " Positivist Church " — " three 

* I cannot be sure that a review of these chapters under present 
lights would confirm the first impression. But I have reason to 
know that what has been said above was the judgment also of so 
sober a critic as President Walker, who first directed my attention 
to them. 



300 THE REIGN OF LAW. 

persons and no God," as was scoffingly said of it — 
is too small in numbers to frighten anybody ; while 
from it have come some of the wisest and humanest 
of all expositions of contemporary politics. Take 
even its much-ridiculed forms of worship. There are 
two features in this droll burlesque of Catholicity (if 
we choose to call it so), which should redeem it 
from contempt. One is certainly interesting and 
noble : the aim to hold in perpetual remembrance 
all those of every time who have done best service 
or honor to humanity. The other is genuinely pa- 
thetic, when we think of that lost world of affection, 
emotion, and faith, which this feeble attempt would 
fain restore. We might pardon much to a ritual 
whose chief sacrament consists in a crust of dry 
bread laid beside the plate at every meal in per- 
petual memory of the poor and needy. 

Comte's childhood was trained amidst the fervoi'S 
of the Catholic reaction in the South of France. His 
mother, a woman of genuine devotion, was his " guar- 
dian angel " and his type of saintliness : it was one 
of his last wishes to be buried by her side. Tlie 
Catholic type of piety he not only held to be the 
most precious thing in the life of the past ; but he 
assiduously cultivated it in himself, keeping Dante 
and the " Imitation of Christ " always on his man- 
tel (where I saw them), and devoting two hours 
of every day to his " spiritual exercises." Far from 
desiring or praising mere assent to his intellectual 
method, he vehemently and jealously insisted that 
his Eeligion was the one thing in his system that 
gave value to the rest ; and he died, I suppose, in 



THE KELIGIOUS INTERl'RETATIOISr. 301 

the belief,- which he expresses somewhere, that if he 
could reach the age of Fontenelle, he should see him- 
self generally recognized as (what he chose to call 
himself) "Founder of the Eeligion of Humanity," 
and a sort of Chief Pontiff of the human race. 

But now, taking the intellectual results to which 
we have been led, it remains to give them our reli- 
gious interpretation. This is widely different from 
that of Comte ; and yet, as I think, we must come 
squarely up to his position before we can get beyond 
it. We must learn to look at the fact purely as 
fact. There is no capacity in the human mind to 
get behind it. We have not to account for the 
Universe, or to apologize for it ; only, if we can, to 
see it as it is. A speculative theodicy is as much 
out of our province as a speculative teleology. 

The right attitude of the religious mind is exactly 
the same as that of the scientific mind, — to humble 
itself before the fact. Only, religion does not stop 
here, as science does. For, in the view of religion, 
the fact itself is not the ultimate thing ; it is the 
condition under which the higher intellectual and 
moral life is to be attained, — that life, of which the 
watchwords are not science, wealth, or delight, but 
obedience and trust and help. 

In the next place, it is not of the smallest conse- 
quence whether we give to the fact a materialistic 
or an idealistic interpretation ; whether, as Mr. Hux- 
ley has worded it, we interpret the Universe in terms 
of thought, or in terms of matter and motion. Either 
of these is simply a reverse view of the other : each 
is, so to speak, the other's reflection in a mirror. For 



302 THE reig:-: of law. 

our religious interpretation, it is absolutely indiffer- 
ent which we take. Some of Mr. Spencer's disciples 
have thought to vindicate him from the charge of 
materialism, and have spoken as if he made a sub- 
stantial concession to the religious mind, when he 
declared that his system could be expounded just as 
well in terms of idealism. Of course it could. It is 
only " beholding his own natural face in a glass." 
Philosophical idealism, so far as it is true at all, is 
simply the double, or ghost, of scientific materialism. 
The sequence of facts may be seen just as well in a 
mirror, which reflects them, as through a lens, which 
refracts them. We have no religious interest what 
ever in discarding or in choosing eitlier. It is simply 
a question which of the two more accurately presents 
to us the orderly sequences of fact. And it is the 
thinnest of sophisms to say that, for any religious 
value they may have, " terms of mind " are one jot 
the better, or " terms of matter " are one jot the 
worse. 

The real antitliesis of materialism is not idealism, 
which is only its ghost or double ; but spiritualism,* 
or some other term by which we express the moral 
freedom of an intelligent agent. So long as we stop 
short with the fact, or concern ourselves only with 
the " laws of similitude and succession of phenome- 
na," we are in the circle of Necessity ; as Comte puts 
it, of " Destiny, which is the sum of known laws, and 
Chance, which is the sum of those laws which are 
unknown." That is, we are on the plane of material- 
ism, or its reflex idealism, — it matters not which. 

* Not Siiiiitism, which is a different thing. 



MORAL FEEEDOM. 303 

But no sane man does stop short with the fact, or 
concern himself only with those unalterable sequences 
which represent to us nothing but an eternal neces- 
sity. Whatever else philosophers differ in, they all 
agree in applying to human actions language which 
would be wildly absurd if applied to mere necessary 
sequences. Expressions of love, blame, praise, con- 
tempt, can only by a violent stretch of fancy be used 
of a flower, a landscape, or a waterfall. Appeals to 
conscience, or urgings to an ideal aim, would be wasted 
upon the most intelligent of brutes. The naturalist 
knows no such emotions in his line of study as the 
moralist must constantly take for granted in his. 
The anatomist must study his human "subject" when 
the life is well out of it : his representative man, as 
Dr. Wilkinson expresses it, is " a corpse, not a gen- 
tleman." In the logic of certain physiologists, the 
normal human being should be a sleepwalker or a 
mesmeric patient. A critic of human acts, or human 
institutions, though he call himself necessarian or 
fatalist, inevitably takes for granted moral agency 
on one part, and moral judgment on the other. We 
have only to consider what this implies, to know 
what is meant when we speak of the universal, un- 
conscious, perpetual testimony of the human race to 
the fact — whatever name we choose to call it by — 
of Moral Freedom. 

Kor, again, do we find this testimony contradicted 
in the least by what we have come to understand 
in the phrase "the Eeign of Law." If we did, we 
should have to reconsider our premises very careful- 
ly, before venturing to deny that universal fact of 



304 THE REIGN OF LAW. 

consciousness. Give to the sphere of Law all the 
expansion we can possibly conceive; still it does 
not, necessarily, mean anything more to us than to 
define the conditions under which we act. Probably 
no living man ever realized to himself what it would 
mean if the Universe were a mere machine of me- 
chanical evolution, instead of being what it is, a field 
for the play of living force and intelligent will.* 

Of course, the range of moral liberty is strictly cir- 
cumscribed. If not, wilful and passionate creatures 
as we are, we should soon have nothing but chaos to 
live in, — as indeed it seems to threaten, sometimes, 
if passion should once arm itself -with modern explo- 
sives. We may not, perhaps, even say that we throw 
the warp upon the woof which Nature gives us. It 
may be that we can only stitch in the faintest em- 
broidery upon the destined web woven by law and 
circumstance : still, that is enough to employ all our 
skill. Our game of chess is limited by the edges of 
the board, the powers of the pieces, and some twenty 
or thirty arbitrary rules which we had no hand in 
making ; but there is enough left to give play to all 
our faculty of choice in determining the moves. 

It is thus that, standing in the midst of this Di- 
vine or natural circle of Necessity, we are entitled, 
without the least trouble to our confidence, to assert 
all we can possibly want or mean in the phrase 
" Moral Freedom." As soon as we once vigorously 
conceive this, we necessarily reflect it back upon the 
Universe, whose laws we have been attempting to 

* An attempt at such realization is found in that strange night- 
mare known as Richter's " Dream." 



ETHICAL BASIS OF THEISM. 305 

understand ; and so, in place of a pitiless Law, a life- 
less Order, a metaphysical Absolute, a cosmic Theism 
ineffectual and pale, we find the Living God. 

Not, necessarily, that we can grasp the intellectual 
conception by the way of a speculative theology. If 
we can, so much the better. Bat all that the reli- 
gious interpretation of the universe demands is given 
us, as soon as we feel ourselves living agents, not 
blind cogs and pinions in the " grind " of blind and 
eternal Law. 

The Theism which accords with the highest con- 
ceptions of our Science is thus seen to be — what 
from the laws of human thought it has all along been 
shown to be — the reflex of our moral conscious- 
ness, not of our intellectual contemplation. It is 
in this sense true that " Conscience is the conscious- 
ness of God," — which as a mere phrase of specu- 
lative philosophy might well seem arrogant and 
futile. It signifies that, constituted as we are, we 
cannot vividly conceive the fact of moral freedom, 
but that the Universe suddenly (so to speak) be- 
comes alive, with life responsive to our own. The 
blank wall of Necessity is seen as a vast transpar- 
ency, illuminated from a light beyond, which shows 
dim hints and traces of a design, intricate and harmo- 
nious, that was invisible before. For it is impossible 
even to think of conscience and moral freedom, or 
moral law, in a universe that is mechanical and 
dead. 

We find in this experience, it is true, no philo- 
sophic definition, and no demonstration of Divine 
Attributes ; but the voluntary, devout, inevitable ac- 



306 THE KEIGN OF LAW. 

ceptance of the fact. And, again, it is not simple 
intellectual acceptance, which is equally good once 
and always. It depends on moral conditions, and so 
will vary with our moral mood. It is less acceptance 
than attainment. It has so much of intellectual ap- 
prehension, and no more, as to serve for the ground- 
work of that discipline which we caU the method of 
the religious life. 

Without this fundamental axiom of the moral 
consciousness, the cosmic Order becomes to us, in- 
evitably, a bleak and terrible Fatalism. So far as 
we can see, the everlasting play of its machinery 
does not grind out either virtue or happiness to the 
great mass of sentient being. We should say rather, 
with Paul, — with Schopenhauer, who in this consents 
with Paul, — that " the whole creation groaneth and 
travaileth in pain together until now." * The solu- 
tion, for us, can only be in the words that complete 
Paul's phrase : " luaiting to he delivered." Fatalism, 
which is the last word of all purely speculative or 
evolutionary schemes, means either a futile Optim- 
ism, of which we can see no proofs, or else a hard 
Pessimism, which is the message of despair. But 
Just here comes in that paradox of our better nature : 
that the instant we set about to right any wrong, 
to make the crooked straight, or diminish the suffer- 
ing and injustice that prevail, the mystery and the 
terror disappear. The feeblest act that wakens the 
moral consciousness works that miracle at which 
theory toils in vain : to make the man, as in Emer- 

* Compare what is said of Paganism in "The Middle Age," 
pp. 179, 180. 



IS CHRISTIANITY PERPETUAL? 307 

son's generous gospel, a counterpoise against the 
universe. 

This result appears to follow from two principles, 
which have been implied all along : * that, from the 
law of our being, we necessarily reflect back upon 
the universe our own sense of right, so that the 
Living God becomes to our thought inevitably a 
Eighteous God, whether or not we understand his 
ways ; f and secondly, that the religious life leads 
of itself into that range of the higher emotions, — 
adoration, gratitude, hope, resting on absolute sub- 
mission to a higher Will, — which are a chief solvent 
of such pain and wrong as may fall to our own pri- 
vate lot. 

The point to be borne in mind, however, is that the 
germ of this higher life is not speculative but ethical. 
It begins with the distinct recognition and choice of 
right as against wrong. If it should attain no more 
than is given in George Eliot's rather feeble phrase 
of " meliorism," even here it finds what, for the indi- 
vidual need, may be a calm, a deep, and a sufficing 
faith : a faith, too, which, raying out from that live 
centre, may come at length to embrace every spirit- 
ual need. 

For the present, I find in this the conclusion of 
the whole matter. It does not come within my plan 

* See the foregoing chapter. 

t This does not by any means imply that Hedonism, or the 
"greatest-happiness principle," is the law of the universe. On the 
contrary, the Divine holiness was never more vividly conceived than 
by the Puritans, whose creed was quite the opposite. In the splen- 
did paradox of Carlyle, "There is in man a higher than the love of 
liappiness. He can do without happiness, and instead thereof find 
blessedness ! " 



308 THE REIGN OF LAW. 

to speak here of what is doing, or what may be done, 
to build religion up again on the new foundations.* 
I wish only, as distinctly as may be, to see just wliere 
that evolution of thought, which is the intellectual 
interpretation of Christian history, has brought us. 
This evolution is the result of innumerable special 
forces ; but behind them all is that prodigious moral 
or spiritual force, which we call the revelation of God 
in human history. In that Word was life ; and the 
life was the light of men. 

It does not, in this view, matter in the least 
whether we regard Christianity under any formal 
definition that can be given of it, as a perpetual 
dispensation, or as destined to be absorbed and lose 
its separate identity in coming growths of religious 
thought. For the present, at all events, it has a 
recognizable character of its own, under all its diver- 
sities, and an unbroken line of tradition which con- 
nects its freest and broadest forms at once with the 
simplicity of its origin, and with its most imperial 
constructions in the so-called Ages of Faith. There 
is no reason whatever to think that its first disci- 
ples expected for it anything like the duration it has 
had alreMy, or the expansion it shows at this hour. 
Those proud constructions of ecclesiasticism and dog- 
ma are, it may be, sure to perish ; but it is of the 
nature of a Force to persist, though in new forms and 
under other names, without any loss of continuity. 
The only immortality we can imagine upon earth is 
the transmission of one life through many forms. 

* The sequel of these pages will be found in ' ' Our Liberal Move- 
ment," especially under the titles — A Scientific Theology, The Reli- 
gion of Humanity, and The Gospel of Liberalism. 



CONCLUSION. 309 

With this conviction I complete a task which was 
planned nearly thirty-five years ago, and which has 
been held, as opportunity seemed to open, steadily in 
view ever since. These thirty-five years have been 
said on high authority to be revolutionary in the 
current religious thought, more than any other period 
of equal length, unless we should except the first 
Christian century. It has been the privilege of my 
birthright in Liberal Christianity, that the intellec- 
tual conditions of religious faith have remained in 
my mind fundamentally the same as when my task 
was first projected. And it will be still more my 
privilege, if there shall be others to whom this fulfil- 
ment of it may prove in any way a help or a comfort, 
such as it has been to me. 



CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE. 



1500. 1492. Alexander VI. 

1509-47. Reign of Henry VIII. 1503. Pius III. 

1510. Luther in Rome. " Jidius II. 

1517. Controversy of Indulgences ; Luther's Theses. 13. Leo X. 

1519-55. Charles V., Emperor. 

1521. Luther at Worms. 22. Adrian VI. 

1525. Battle of Pavia. — Peasants' War. 23. Clement VII. 

1529. Conference of Marburg : Luther and Zwingli. 

1531. War of the Cantons: Death of Zwingli. 34. Paul III. 

1536. Calvin at Geneva. — 39. " Six Articles " of Henry VIIL 

1540. Jesuit Order. — 42. General Inquisition. 

1545-63. Council of Trent. 

1547. Smalcaldic War. — Edvfaed VI. ; Henry II. 

1553. Burning of Servetus in Geneva. 50. Julius III. 

1553-58. Philip and Mary. 

1555. Peace of Augsburg: Abdication of Charles V. 55. Paul IV. 

1558-1603. Elizabeth. 

1559. Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis. 59. Pius IV. 

1560-98. Religious Wars in France. 

1566-1609. War of Netherlands. 66. Pius V. 

1572. Massacre of St. Bartholomew. 72. Gregory XIII. 

1584. Murder of Orange. 

1588. Destmction of the Spanish Armada. 85. Sixtus V. 

1589-1610. Henry IV. 90. Gregory XIV. 

1598. Religious Peace : Edict of Nantes. 91. Clement VIII. 

Note. — The Council of Trent sat at interv^als determined by political 
consirterations, and held in all twenty-five sessions. The topics were in 
general these: 1546. The Creed, the Canon of Scripture (which is defined 
to that of the Latin Vulgate), and the doctrines of Original Sin and Bap- 
tism. — 1547. Doctrines of Justification and Sacraments. — 1551. The 
Eucharist, Penance, Extreme Unction. — 1562-3. Celebration of Mass, 
Hoh' Orders, Matrimony, Purgatory, and Worship of Saints. 



312 CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE. 

Popes. 
1600. Martyrdom of Giordano Brano. 

1603-25. James I. 1605. Paul V. 

1608. Independents emigrate to Holland. 
1610. Murder of Henry IV. — Catholic League. 
1610-43. Louis XIII. (Mary de Medicis). 
1615. War of Huguenots under Conde. 
1618. Synod of Dort. — 19. Execution of Barneveldt. 
1618-48. Thii-ty Years' War. 

1620. Pilgrim Colony at Plymouth. 21. Gregory XV. 

1624-42. Ministry of Richelieu. 3. Urban VIII. 

1625-48. Charles I. 

1628. Rochelle taken ; Huguenot power destroyed. 
1629-41. " Thorough " policy of Laud and Stafford. 
1632. Battle of Liitzen ; Death of Gustavus. 
1640. Publication of Jansen's Augustinus. 
1642-48. Civil War in England. 

1643-1715. Louis XIV. 44. Innocent X. 

1645. Battle of Naseby ; Supremacy of Independents. 

1648. Peace of Westphalia. 

1649. Execution of Charles I. : Commonwealth. 

1653. Jansen's Five Propositions condemned. 55. Alexander VII. 

1660. Restoration of Charles II. 

1662. Act of Uniformity: Nonconformists. 

1662. " Half-way Covenant " in New England. 

1664. Conventicle Act. 

1665. Persecution of Jansenists. 

1665. Five-Mile Act. 67 Clement IX. 

1673. Test Act (abolished, 1828). 70. Clement X. 

1681-87. Sect of Quietists : Molinos. 76. Innocent XL 

1682. " Galilean Liberties " asserted. 

1685. Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. 
1685-89. James II. 

1686. " Declaration of Indulgence" to Catholics. 

1689. English Revolution: William III. 89. Alexander VIII. 
1696-1748. Deistical Controversy. 91. Innocent XII. 

J. 700, Act of Succession : Non-juring Clergy. 1700. Clement XI. 
L^ 1709. Destruction of Port-Royal. 

1714. George I. — Jacobite and Papist plots. 
1722. Moravian Community (Herrnhut). 



CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINE. 313 

Popes. 
1715-74, Louis XV. (1715-23. Orleans Regency.) 
1717. Bangorian Controversy (Hoadly and Non-jurors). 
1727. Abbe Paris t — Convulsionriaires. 21. InnoceM XIII. 

1735. " Great Awakening " in New England. 24. Benedict XIII. 

1739. Secession of Wesley : Methodism. 30. Clevwnt XII. 

1740. Eise of Swedenborgianism. 40. Benedict XIV. 
1751-65. The Encyclopsedia (Diderot and D'Alembert). 

1755. Earthquake at Lisbon : Persecution of Jews. 

1760-1820. George IIL 58. Clement XIII. 

1762. Execution of Galas. 

1764. Jesuits expelled from France. 69. Clement XIV. 

1773. Jesuit Order abolished (restored, 1814). 

1774-92. Reign of Louis XVI. 75. Pius VI. 

1781. Publication of Kant's Philosophy. 

1789. French Revolution: Privileges abolished. 

1790. Suppression of Monastic Houses in France. 

1791. Oath to Constitution required. 

1 793. Reign of Terror : Persecution of French Clergy. 

1795. ^QstiYsl of :^tre Supreme. 

1797. Sect of Theophilanthropists established. 

1800. Victories of Napoleon. 1800. Pius VII. 

1801. Concordat of Napoleon. 

1806. " Holy Roman Empire " abolished. 

1808. Inquisition abolished in Italy and Spain. 

1809. Captivity of Pius VII. ; Temporal Power abolished. 

1814. Jesuits and Inquisition restored. 

1815. Holy Alliance : Russia, Austria, and Prussia. 

1828. Repeal of Test Act. 23. Leo XII. 

1829. Catholic Emancipation in England. 29. Pius VIII. 
1832. Passage of Reform Bill. 31. Gregory XVI. 
1833-41. Tractarianism at Oxford. 

1843. Free Church in Scotland. 46 Pius IX. 

1854. Doctrine of Immaculate Conception. 

1864. Syllabus of Errors (Encyclical of Pius IX.) 

1869. Irish Church Disestablished. 

1870. Papal infallibility declared ; Temporal Power abolished. 

1871. German Empire restored. 78. Leo XIII. 
1880. Unauthorized Congregations forbidden in France. 



EMINENT NAMES. 



Theology and. Philosophy. 
Erasmus, 1467-1536. 
Luther, 1483-1546. 
Zwingli, 1484-1531. 
Loyola, 1491-1556. 
Calviu, 1509-1564. 
Knox, 1505-1572. 
Molina, 1535-1601. 
Arminius, 1560-1609. 
Jansen, 1585-1638. 
Arnauld, 1612-1694. 
Bossuet, 1627-1704. 
Locke, 1632-1704. 
Malebranche, 1638-1715. 
Fenelon, 1651-1715. 
Clarke, 1675-1729. 
Berkeley, 1684-1753. 
Butler, 1692-1752. 
Hume, 1711-1776. 
Kant, 1724-1804. 
Jacobi, 1743-1819. 
Schleiermacher, 1768-1834. 
Coleridge, 1772-1834. 
Channing, 1780-1842. 
Lamennais, 1782-1854. 
Lacordaire, 1802-1861. 



Science and Letters. 
Copernicus, 1473-1543, 
Montaigne, 1533-1592, 
Giordano Bruno, 1550-1600. 
Kaleigh, 1552-1618. 
Bacon, 1561-1626. 
Shakspeare, 1564-1616. 
Galileo, 1564-1642. 
Kepler, 1571-1630. 
Hobbes, 1588-1679. 
Descartes, 1596-1650. 
Milton, 1608-1674. 
Pascal, 1623-1662. 
Spinoza, 1632-1677. 
Leibnitz, 1646-1716. 
Newton, 1642-1727. 
Bayle, 1647-1706. 
Voltaire, 1694-1778. 
Eousseau, 1712-1778. 
Lessing, 1729-1781. 
Laplace, 1749-1827. 
Dalton, 1766-1844, 
Chateaubriand, 1769-1848. 
Comte, 1798-1857. 
Carlyle, 1795-1881. 
Darwin, 1809-1882. 



INDEX. 



I. The Protestant Eeformation, 1-25. — Tragedy of the Refor- 
mation, its causes: ambition of the Church, 3; moral influence of the 
Church, 5. Indulgences, 8. Luther : his experience, 9 ; at Worms, 10 ; 
his followers, 12. .Justification by Faith, 14. Reformation-period, 18. 
Results : individualism, 20 ; relation to society, 22 ; weakness and 
strength of Protestantism, 24. 

II. The Catholic Reaction, 26-47. —Two reformations, 27. Prot- 
estant errors, 29. J^ew Religious Orders: Theatines, 32; Jesuits (Loy- 
ola), 33. The Inquisition, 36. Borromeo, 39. Campaign of the Church, 
40. Its policy, 42. Its self-limitation, 44. 

III. Calvinism, 48-73. — Its decay, 49. Calvin, 51; his creed, 52. 
Spirit of the time, 54. Natural and moral evil, 56. The creed a weapon, 
59 ; objects of attack : Rome, 60 ; Art, 62. Aggressive force, 65 ; Sab- 
batarian spirit, 67 ; missionary spirit, 68. Its destiny, 69. Modern rep- 
resentatives, 70. 

IV. The Puritan Commonwealth, 74-99. Political ideal, 75. 
Republicanism in England, 76; the Puritans, 79; Independents, 80. 
New England colony, 81. France: the Huguenots, 84. Cromwell, 86. 
Milton, 87 : his political faith, 91 ; Areopagitica, 93 ; last appeal, 95. The 
Restoration, 96. Nonconformists, 97. 

V. Port Royal, 100-125. — Jacqueline Arnauld, 101. The commu- 
nity, 103. The confessional, 105. Two Port Roj'als, 106. Jansenist 
controversy, 107. Molina, 109. Pascal, 112 : TJioughis, 115 ; knowledge 
and faith, 118. Provincial Letters, 121. Age of Louis XIV., 123. 

VI. Passage from Dogma to Pure Reason, 126-154. — Century 
of controversy, 126. Authority of Scripture, 127. Idea of Revelation, 
128. Appeal to Reason, 130. Doctrine of Decrees, 133. Descartes, 135 : 
his method, 136; its limitations, 138; ideas, 139; substance and attri- 
bute, 140, 146 ; matter and spirit, 141. Spinoza, Leibnitz, 143. Male- 
branche, Berkeley, 144. Hume, 147. Kant, 150. Results of Kantian 
movement, 152. 

VII. English Rationalism, 155-184. — Freedom of English thought, 
156. Era of Elizabeth, 157. Hobbes, 159. Locke, 160 : his " Reason- 



31G 



ableness," 163; its limitations, 165. Cudworth, 166. Influence of New- 
ton, 167. Clarke, 168. Butler, 170. Eighteenth-century theology, 174. 
Deistical controversy, 176. Results: historical method, 181; Broad- 
church liberalism, 182. 

VIII. Infidelity in France, 18.5-21-3. — The Gallican Liberties; 
Edict of Nantes, 187. Church and King, 189. Dragonnades, 190. The 
Revocation, 191. Regency, 193. Sacred Heart, 195. Convulsionnaires, 
196. Bayle, 198. The Encyclopedists, 199. Persecution: Calas, 201: 
La Barre, 202. Voltaire, 203. Rousseau, 206. Revolutionary creed, 
208. Napoleon's Concordat, 211. 

IX. The Gerjian Critics, 214-241. — Authority and use of the 
Bible, 215. Owen, 216. Earlier criticism, 218. Lessing, 219-226. The 
"Fragments," 222. Later schools, 226. Paulus, 229. Strauss, 232. 
Baur, 235. Historical criticism: its present task, 2-39. 

X. Speculative Theology, 242-271. — Ecclesiastical revival, 243. 
Ultramontanism, 244; Tractarianism, 245. Jacobi, 246; value of his 
method, 249; an act of Faith, 250. Schleiermacher, 254: his earh- 
training, 255; Discourses, 258. Data of Christian consciousness, 260; 
of the Religious consciousness, 262. Speculative theism, 264. The law 
of holiness, 267. Service of Schleiermacher, 269. 

XL The Reign of Law, 272— 309. — Earlier conception: Hooker, 
273. Bacon, 274. Galileo, 275. Kepler, 276. Newton, 277. True idea 
of Law, 281. Chemical affinity, 285. Law as ultimate fact, 290. Comte, 
293 : his development of the idea of Law, 295 ; his religion of human- 
ity, 299. Materialism and Idealism, 301. Religious conception, as 
grounded on the sense of moral freedom, 303. Practical results, 306. 

Abolitionists, 15, 42, 68. Berkeley, 144-147. 

Absolute, idea of, 149, 152. Bible, authority of, 22, 127, 215. 

Affinity, in chemistry, 286. Bohemia, Hussite war, 4, 255. 

Analogy (Butler), 171-174. Borromeo, 39, 46. 

Anselm: on justification, 9; on di- Bossuet, 123, 125, 192. 

vine existence, 139. Broad Church, 182. 

Areopagitica (Milton), 93. Bruno, Giordano, 137, 157. 

Arminian controversy, 133. Burns, 70. 

Arnauld : Jacqueline, 101-103; An- Butler, 170-174, 180. 

toine, 103, 121, 123, 192. 

Art and Religion, 62-65. Calas, 186; story of, 201. 

Authority : of Church, 5, 44; of Bi- Calvin, 51-54. 58, 67. 

ble, 6, 127, 215; of creed, 22. Calvinism, 48-73, 108, 110, 132. 
Cambr^sis, treatv of, 84. 

Bacon, 75,77. 80, 153, 158, 167, 274. Caraffa (Paul IV.), 32, 37. 

Baur, F. C, 235. Carlyle, 71, 86, 185, 199. 

Bayle, 198. Carranza (Archb'p of Toledo), 37. 



INDEX. 



317 



Casuistry, 107, 121. 
Catholic Church (modern), as a po- 
litical power, 4; its hold on its 
subjects, 5; its blunder, 7; its 
aims, 28, 40; its temper, 42-45; 
inferior clergy, 45. 
Catholic Reaction (of Sixteenth 
Century), 26-47; (of Nineteenth), 
244. 
Chalmers, 70, 251, 252. 
Chemical affinity, 285-288. 
Clarke, Samuel, 168-170. 
Coleridge, 98, 216, 270. 
Commonwealth (Puritan), 74-99. 
Comparative studj' of religions, 239. 
Comte, 284, 29.3-301. 
Concordat of Napoleon, 211, 244. 
Confessional, power of, 104. 
Congregationalism in New Eng- 

land,^82, 83. 
Constitutional clergy of France, 

210, 211. 
Conviction of sin, how related to 

religious belief, 250. 
Convulsionnaires, 115, 196. 
Correggio, 64. 
Cosmic theism, 264, 305. 
Criticism, task of, 215, 226, 241; 

textual, 217 ; birth of, 219. 
Cromwell, 86. 
Cudworth, 166. 

Dalton, laws of chemistry, 285. 
Declaration of Galilean liberties, 

124, 187. 
Decrees (divine), doctrine of, 52, 

108, 109, 132. 
Deistical controversj', 176-182 ; 

writers, 178 ; result, 183. 
Democracy in Europe, its origin, 

75, 84; its creed, 208. 
Descartes, 130, 135-142, 156. 
Design in nature, 290. 
Discipline in the Roman Church, 

27, 43, 45, 105. 
Discoveries in America, 75. 



Dissent in England, 98. 
Dort, Synod of, 81, 133. 
Dragonnades, 190. 
Dubois, 186, 193. 

Elizabeth, 79, 127, 157.. 
Encyclopedists, 199. 
English Rationalism, 155-184. 
Enthusiasm, English dislike to, 165. 
Evil, natural and moral, 56-58. 

Faith, justification by, 14-16 ; battle 
of, 42; an act of , 250, 251. 

F(5nelon, 46, 123, 125, 192. 

Fifth Monarch}', 75, 95. 

Final causes, argument from, 290. 

Five points of Calvinism, 52 ; prop- 
ositions of Jansen, 104, 111. 

Flach (Flacius), 132, 133. 

Formulary against Jansen, 123 

Francis de Sales, St., 105. 

Free-will asserted by Jesuits, 108. 

Galileo, 119, 275. 
Gallican liberties, 124, 187. 
Gangrsena (T. Edwards), 94. 
German Ckitics, 214-241. 
Gravitation: Galileo, 275; Newton, 
277-280. 

Hegel, 232. 

Henry IV. (of France), 62, 86, 101, 

122. 
Herbert, Lord Edward, 158. 
Hierarchy of the Sciences, 297. 
Historical method in criticism, 181, 

235-238, 240. 
Hobbes, 159, 208. 
Holy Thorn, miracle of, 115. 
Hooker, praise of Law, 273. 
Huguenots in France, 85, 188. 
Hume, 147-149, 150, 155, 177, 178. 
Hymns of the Reformers, 13. 

Idealism, 145, 146, 302. 
Imputation, doctrine of, 9. 



318 



INDEX. 



Independents in England, 80, 86. 
Indulgences, theory of, 8. 
InfalUbility, 26, 41, 107, 111, 244. 
Infidelity in Fkanck, 185-213. 
•Inquisition, 36-40, 244. 

Jacobi, 246-254. 

Jansen, 109. 

Jansenist doctrine, 133; controver- 
sy, 107-111. 

Jansenists, a persecuting party, 201, 
203. 

Jerome's translation of the Bible, 
127, 214, 215. 

Jesuits, 35 ; in America, 66 ; hostil- 
ity to Port Royal, 102, 111; Mo- 
linist doctrine, 108; Sacred Heart, 
195 ; the order abolished, 200. 

Justification by faith, 9, 14-16, 18, 
22, 131. 

Kant, 143, 150-154, 219, 226, 228. 
Kepler, 276. 

La Barre, execution of, 202. 

Lardner, 175, 181. 

Latitude-men, 166. 

Law, conceptions of, 273, 281, 295; 
verification of, 292. 

Leibnitz, 143, 156, 284. 

Lessing, 219-226. 

Leverrier, 292. 

Liberalism, contrasted with Calvin- 
ism, 50; in English Church, 182. 

L'Infame, 202, 205. 

Locke, 160-166, 179. 209. 

Louis XIV., Ill, 123, 187-192. 

Loyola, 33-38. 

Luther, on indulgences, 8 ; at Rome, 
9; at Worms, 10; his position, 11, 
131; his compromises, 29. 

Malebranche, 144. 
Marburg, conference of, 20, 29. 
Melanchthon, 27, 42, 128, 133. 
Metaphysics discredited, 149. 



Middleton, 176, 178. 
Mill, J. S., 15,290,297. 
Milton, 87-96, 161, 163. 
Missionary spirit, 35, 68. 
Molina, 108; his doctrine, 109, 110, 

122, 133. 
Moliuos, 134. 
Montesquieu, 194, 199. 
Moral freedom, as basis of religious 

ideas, 304. 
Moravian Brethren, 255. 
Mythology (Greek), 64. 

Nantes, Edict of, 187; revocation, 

191. 
Netherlands, war of, 66, 81. 
New England colony, 66, 81-83. 
Newton, 156, 167, 277-281. 
Nonconformists, 97. 

Obedience as a moral act, 134. 
Oceana (Harrington), 78. 
Organization in Roman Church, 30. 
Orleans Regency, 193. 
Osiandrian controversy, 131. 
Owen (John), 216. 

Paganism, 7 ; in art, 63. 

Paley, 175. 

Pascal, 105, 112-122 ; Thoughts, 

115; knowledge and faith, 118; 

Provincial Letters, 121. 
Passage fimm Dogsia to Pure 

Reasox, 126-154. 
Paulus, 229-232. 
Persecution in Roman Church, 36- 

40, 46, 105, 127 ; under Louis 

XIV. 188-193; later examples, 

194, 201. 
Physiology, facts of, 289. 
Plymouth Colony, 81-83. 
Port Royal. 1()0-125. 
Positive Philosophy, 294, 296. 
Predestinatitm, 59, 108, 132. 
Presbyterians in England, 80, 83, 

86. 96. 



319 



Protestantism, variations, 17; indi- 
vidualism, 20 ; weakness, 21 ; 
compromises, 24, 29 ; strength 
and glory, 25; moral disorders, 
29 ; right of private judgment, 
127. 

Protestants, their iidelitj', 17. 

Provincial Letters (Pascal), 121. 

Puritan Commonwealth, 74-99. 

Puritanism in art, 63. 

Puritans in England, 66, 80. 

Quietism, 134. 

Ealeigh, 77, 78, 157. 
Rationalism, English, 155-184. 
Eeason, appeal to, in England, 174; 

in France, 197; truths of, 225,263. 
Reformation, Protestant, 1-25. 
Reformers, earlier, 2; in humbler 

classes, 12. 
Reign of Law, 272-309. 
Reimarus, 221. 
Religion of Humanitj^, 299. 
Religious art, 63. 
Religious Orders, 30. 
Republicanism, modern doctrine of, 

61; in France, 85, 188. 
Revelation, conception of, 128. 
Revolution: method, 3; creed, 207, 

210. 
Romanism, 35, 41, 44; compared 

with Protestantism, 22, 126. 
Rousseau, 206-209. 

Sabbatarianism, 67. 

Sacred Heart, worship of, 195. 

Salvation by faith, 15, 162. 



Scepticism of Hume, 150. 
Schleiermacher, 254-262, 269, 271. 
Semler, 218, 219. 
Sentiment, religion of, 195, 208; 

new gospel of, 207. 
Shakspeare, 76, 157. 
Sidney, Algernon, 78; Philip, 77, 

157. 
Social contract, 208. 
Social ideal of church, 23. 
Speculative Theology, 242-271. 
Spinoza, 143, 247, 260. 
Strauss, 232-234. 
Substance and attribute, 139, 145, 

147, 149. 
Symbolic character of religious 

'thought, 233, 267, 269. 

Teleological argument, 290. 

Tetzel, 8. 

Theatine Order, 31-33. 

Theism, speculative (or cosmic), 

264; moral basis of, 305. 
Theodicy (Leibnitz), 144. 
Thirty Years' War, 18, 81, 134, 162. 
Thurlow (Lord), 97. 
Toland, 176. 
Trent, Council of, 41, 127, 311. 

Ultramontanism, 212, 244. 
Unigenitus (Bull of Clement XL), 

194. 
Utopia (Sir Thomas More), 75. 

Voltaire, 144, 169, 186, 193, 198, 
203-206, 218. 

Waterland, 180. 



University Press : John Wilson & Son, Canabridge. 



CHRISTIAN HISTORY 

IN ITS THREE GREAT PERIODS. 

By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, 

Latk Lecturer on Ecclesiastical History in Harvard University. 



First Period. "EARLY CHRISTIAIN^ITY." — 

Topics: i. The Messiah and the Christ; 2. Saint Paul; 
3. Christian Thought of the Second Century ; 4. The Mind 
of Paganism ; 5. The Arian Controversy ; 6. Saint Augus- 
tine ; 7. Leo the Great; 8. Monasticism as a Moral Force; 

9. Christianity in the East ; 10. Conversion of the Barba- 
rians ; II. The Holy Roman Empire; 12. The Christian 
Schools. 

Second Period. "THE MIDDLE AGE." — 
Topics: i. The Ecclesiastical System; 2. Feudal Society; 
3. The Work of Hildebrand ; 4. The Crusades ; 5. Chiv- 
alry ; 6. The Religious Orders ; 7. Heretics ; 8. S'cholastic 
Theology; 9. Religious Art; 10. Dante; 11. The Pagan 
Revival. 

Third Period. " MODERN PHASES." — Topics : 
I. The Protestant Reformation ; 2. The Catholic Reaction ; 
3. Calvinism ; 4. The Puritan Commonwealth ; 5. Port 
Royal ; 6. Passage from Dogma to Philosophy ; 7. English 
Rationalism; 8. Infidelity in France ; 9. The German Critics; 

10. Speculative Theology ; 11. The Reign of Law. 

Each volume contains a Chronological Outline of its Period, with a 
full Table of Contents and Index, and may be ordered separately. 

Volume I. (" Early Christianity ") is, with a few additions, — the most 
important being a descriptive List of Authorities, — the same that was 
published in 1880, under the title, " Fragments of Christian History." 
3 volumes. i6mo. Cloth. Price, $1.25 ^er volume. 

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vols., $3.75 ; " Hebrew Men and Times from the Patriarchs to the Messiah," 
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tions of the History of Unitarianism in New England," §1.25, may be had, 
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Sold by all booksellers. Mailed, post-paid, on receipt of advertised price, by 
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LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, 

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HEBREW MEN AND TIMES 

FROM THE 

lPatrtarri)2; to fte jflessiaft* 

By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, 
Lecturer on Ecclesiastical History in Harvard University. 
New Edition, with an Introduction on the results of recent Old 
Testament criticism. Chronological Outline and Index. i6mo. 
Price, $1.50. 

Topics, i. The Patriarchs; 2. Moses; 3. The Judges; 
4. David ; 5. Solomon ; 6. The Kings ; 7. The Law ; 8. The 
Prophets; 9. The Captivity ; 10. The Maccabees; li. The Alex- 
andrians ; 12. The Messiah. 

Extract from the Preface: "... There seemed room and need of a clear, 
brief sketch, or outline ; one that should spare the details and give the re- 
sults of scholarship ; that should trace the historical sequences and connec- 
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" We shall be satisfied to have excited interest enough in the theme to induce 
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that he has only made freer the access to the halls of faith. There is no light of 
loose or unbecoming sentence in the volume. There is no insincere paragraph. 
There is no heedless line. And this perhaps is one of the greatest charms of the 
book ; for it is rare indeed that both intellect and heart are satisfied with the 
same letters." 

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publishers 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, Boston. 



OUR LIBERAL MOVEMENT 
IN THEOLOGY, 

Chiefly as shown in Recollections of the History of Uni- 
tarianism in New England. Being a Closing Course of 
Lectures given in the Harvard Divinity School. 

By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, 

Lecturer on Ecclesiastical fiistory in Harvard University. 

Second edition. i6mo. Cloth. Price $1.25. 



" It is a review of the history and antecedents of New England Unita- 
rianism, interspersed with interesting personal reminiscences, and ending 
with an appreciation of the tendencies of modern liberal theology and a 
forecast of the future." — New York Tribune, 

" The first five of these lectures give a very readable and interesting 
sketch and criticism of the history of Unitarianism in New England. 
These are followed by three lectures, the subjects of which are, ' A Scien- 
tific Theology,' ' The Religion of Humanity,' and ' The Gospel of Liberal- 
ism.' The book is a valuable and instructive study of what Unitarianism 
is, and how it came to be what it is." — New Englander. 

" The chapters are well composed and well informing, and the style of 
the writer is clear and engaging. He writes of that in which he believes, 
and does not allow himself to drift far from his subject. The work consti- 
tutes a very fair and convenient hand-book on the Unitarian movement, 
certainly an historical movement, and one which has left its impress upon 
the religious thinking of all denominations. We welcome the book as a just 
and entertaining presentation of a form of belief which has found more 01 
less acceptance among us." — Standard, Chicago. 



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Boston. 



Outline of Christian History. 

A. D. 50-1880. 

By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN. 

Author of '■^Hebrew Men and Times," " Christian History in its Threo 
Great Periods," " Our Liberal Movement in Theology^' etc. 

i6mo, Cloth. Price, 75 Cents. 

This " Outline " is designed by Mr, Allen, primarily, as a manual 
for class instruction. It is printed in different sizes of type, and the 
twelve chapters are to be studied as so many lessons, using only the por- 
tions in the larger type, — in which the general scheme or course of events 
are clearly stated. — after which particular periods may be studied in more 
detail. It is a very valuable epitome, not a history, and will be found a 
useful guide to more extended study of Christian history. The topics 
selected as lessons are the Messianic Period, the Martyr Age, Age of Con- 
troversies and Creeds, the Church and Barbarians, the Church and Feudal- 
ism, Dawn of the Modern Era, the Reformations, Wars of Religion, the 
English Puritans, Modern Christianity, the Nineteenth Century, and an 
Index of Topics and Names. — Journal of Education. 

The little work, as its title indicates, is designed as a manual for class 
instruction on the origin, growth, and principles of Christianity from its 
foundation to the present time. It consists of twelve chapters, and each 
chapter is devoted to one particidar epoch of Christian history. It is one 
of the most carefully and skilfully compiled volumes of religious history we 
have yet seen, and will be found invaluable to students, old as well as 
young. — Saturday Evening Gazette. 

It would seem impossible to cover such a space with so limited a 
manual, but it is happily and ably accomplished by Mr. Allen. His 
three or four historical compendiums of ecclesiastical events are well known. 
The present handbook forms an admirable text-book for a class of young 
people in ecclesiastical history, and will afford to any reader a good idea of 
the progress of the Christian Church, with its most noted names and de- 
nominational families, during the whole period from the first century down 
to our days. There seems to be a marked fairness in the condensed sketches 
of men of different sects and their special religious movements. It is cer- 
tainly a useful little manual. — Zion's Herald. 



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by the Publishers, 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, 

Boston. 



POSITIVE RELIGION. 

ESSAYS, FRAOMENTS, AND HINTS. 

By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, 

Author of " Christian History in its Three Great Periods," 

" Hebrew Men and Times," etc. 

16MO. CI_OTH. PRICE, Sl-25. 

Among the subjects treated may be noted the following, viz. : 
"How Religions Grow," "A Religion of Trust," "The World-Re- 
ligions," "The Death of Jesus," "The Question of a Future Life," 
" The Bright Side," " Religion and Modern Life," etc. 

The subjects are discussed, as one will indeed plainly see, by a learned 
Christian scholar, and from that height in life's experience which one reaches 
at three score and ten years. They treat of the growth of religion ; of relig- 
ion as an experience; of the terms "Agnostic" and "God" ; of the mystery 
of pain, of immortality and kindred topics. The author is among the best 
known of the older Unitarians, and the breadth of his views, together with his 
modesty of statement and ripeness of judgment, give the book a charm not too 
common in religious works. The literary style is also pleasing. — Advertiser. 

This little volume of 260 pages contains much that is fresh and interesting 
and some things which are true only from a Unitarian standpoint. It is 
always delightful to read an author who knows what he is writing about, 
and can present his thoughts in a clear and forcible manner. His intention 
is to exhibit religion not so much "as a thing of opinion, of emotion, or of 
ceremony, as an element in men's own experience, or a force, mighty and 
even passionate, in the world's affairs." Such an endeavor is highly lauda- 
ble, and the work has been well done. — Christian Mirror. 

A collection of a acute, reverent, and suggestive talks on some of the great 
themes of religion. Many Christians will dissent from his free handling of 
certain traditional views, dogmas of Christianity, but they will be at once with 
him in his love of goodness and truth, and in his contention that religion finds 
its complete fruition in the lives rather than the speculative opinions of men.^. 
N. Y. Tribune. 

Mr. Allen strikes straight out from the shoulder, with energy that shows 
his natural force not only unabated, but increased with added years. " At 
Sixty: A New Year Letter" is sweet and mellow with the sunshine of the 
years that bring the philosophic mind. But we are doing what we said that 
we must not, and must make an arbitrary end. Yet not without a word of 
admiration for the splendid force and beauty of many passages. These are 
the product of no artifice, but are uniformly an expression of that humanity 
which is the writer's constant end and inspiration. In proportion as this finds 
free and full expression, the style assumes a warmth and color that not only 
give an intellectual pleasure, but make the heart leap up with sympathetic 
courage and resolve. — J. IV. C. 

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LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, 

Boston. 



ETHICAL RELIGION 

BY WILLIAM MACKINTIRE SALTER. 
One volume. 12m. Cloth, Price, $1.50. 



The familiar saying about the prophet and his own country is freshly 
illustrated by Mr. William M. Salter, of the Chicago Society for Ethical 
Culture, whose works might be called for in vain at most American book- 
stores, and which are yet translated into German, and in Germany every- 
where, as Mr. Edwin D. Mead writes, exposed for sale. . . . We, for our 
part, will say that the compliment done Mr. Salter in the recognition of 
his earnest and thoughtful work is richly deserved. — Chicago Dial. 

He [Mr. Salter] is a man of eloquence and earnestness, as these dis- 
courses show ; and their translation into German evinces their power to 
commend themselves to a much wider constituency than that to which they 
were first addressed. — The American , 

There is not a little to commend in this volume. It inculcates a lofty 
morality, and is far above the level of the utilitarian and evolutionary 
moralists. — Presbyterian Review. 

I am particularly obliged to you for Salter's book. Please say to him 
that I feel that I have gained theoretically as well as practically from read- 
ing it. What a noble and pure spirit breathes through the whole! I have 
derived a fresh confidence in the power of a philosophy of life based on free 
investigation. — Professor Harold H'offding, of the Utiiversity of Copen- 
hagen. 

In the Zeitschrift fiir Philosophie und Philosophische Kritik 
(Beigabeheft des^^steft-^Bandcs, iS86) Professor Jodl says, at the 
conclusion of ajji attehded review : — 

To a boq^k like Strauss's Old and New Faith is Die Religion der 
Moral for these reasons infinitely superior, as well with respect to its 
scientific foundation as to its practical influence; and I cannot omit to 
recommend Salter's book to the most earnest attention of all those who 
feel the need of replacing the unhappy dualism between the religious and 
the scientific stand-points with a comprehensive ideal view. 



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price, by the publishers. 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY, 

Boston. 



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